


If This Be Error...

by TheGoodTwin (ProtoNeoRomantic)



Series: IT'S ALL TERRIBLY SIMPLE [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Episode: s02e17 Passion, Episode: s02e18 Killed by Death, F/M, Non-Canonical Character Death, Older Man/Younger Woman, Teen Pregnancy, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-30
Updated: 2014-06-30
Packaged: 2018-02-06 20:01:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 36,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1870542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/TheGoodTwin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Angel kills Jenny Calendar, grief leads Buffy and Giles to make a terrible mistake.  Or so they keep telling themselves.</p><p>This is the first story of a shy coy and naive version of "All Things Proceed from Passion", with complementary copy of The Watchtower, almost really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Those Three Words

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Lady's Choice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1223416) by [ProtoNeoRomantic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/ProtoNeoRomantic). 



> This takes place at the same time and covers most of the same plot points as Lady's Choice Part I, "A Thing That Happened"
> 
> For more information on Canon Compliance/Divergence and Story Mechanics and Themes, see series description.
> 
> WARNING: Although there are no graphic depictions of sexual activity in this story, the plot is dependent on the fact of sexual activity having taken place between a seventeen-year-old female and an adult male.

Buffy slapped Giles hard in the face, hard enough to knock him to the ground. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?!” she demanded, beside herself with rage and fear. Tears streamed down her face.

Reeling from the shock of the blow, struggling to master his own anger and humiliation, Giles tried to get to his feet. Buffy stopped him at his knees, kneeling beside him, pulling him into her arms with the ferocity of a mother snatching her child from a busy street.

Rupert felt like a child. Like a fool. Like an un-man. A damned damsel in distress, in need of heroic rescue.

But Buffy’s voice took on a quavering, forlorn tone as the enormity of what she had prevented seemed to strike her. “You can’t leave me!” she wailed, suddenly, desperately a child herself, clinging to him, seeking his strength, his protection. “I can’t do this alone!”

They melted together, sobbing, their faces pressed against each other, needing contact, needing to be closer than it was physically possible to be, to draw strength from each other that neither alone possessed.

*****

“The best part was the look on his face!” Angel crowed, strutting around the sodding sewer tunnel like the king coxcomb of some place actually important, “When he saw that first rose and he realized she was already there, waiting for him!” Drusilla clapped her hands with fawning delight. “Exactly how I pictured it. I can just _imagine_ the look on his face when he actually saw the body!” Drusilla licked her lips and teeth lasciviously.

“He’s standing there, right?” Angel continued gleefully, “His soul crushed, wishing he was dead, but still, some little part of him is mostly just disappointed that—”

“So what!?!” Spike declared bitterly. “We got burned out of our bloody home because of this!”

“It was so worth it!” Angel purred, grinning at Drusilla, caressing her cheek, as if Spike wasn't even there.

“My bleeding flunkies are scattered,” Spike continued to fume. “Most of them we’ll probably never see again! And we are squatting in a sewer, slinking about in the droppings of the cattle we ought to be feasting upon! And your beloved Slayer is still no closer to being dead! Tell me!” he demanded, “How in blazes is that 'worth it'!?!”

“They’ll come to us,” Angel said confidently, addressing the only point he thought deserved an answer. “Vampires are mostly just shorn sheeple. They’ll crave our boots on their necks. Probably start showing up about sunrise.”

“And if not!?!” Spike seethed.

“Then, it was still worth it,” Angel declared, patiently amused. “You see, my boy,” he explained in an irritatingly fatherly way, “evil isn't about what you gain for yourself. It's about what you take from other people.”

“Well,” Spike declared with blistering sarcasm, “when you put it that way, it all makes perfect, bloody sense! I mean, who'd want to sleep in a clean comfortable bed and have dozens of devoted followers when you could make a middle aged librarian feel really, really bad about almost getting shagged(!)”

*****

By the time they got to the car, Giles was able to look Buffy in the face intermittently and she had recovered herself enough to give him a small meant-to-be-comforting smile that told him she felt as lost as he did. She looked tired. He felt tired, emotionally wrung out.

Her hopeful, searching liquid green gaze was more than he could bear. He’d betrayed her trust, though she probably didn’t yet see it that way. He had taken advantage of her guilt and grief to ease his own suffering. “I’d ...better get you home,” he said stiffly, turning to face the steering wheel, avoiding further eye contact.

Buffy was silent as Giles put the car in gear, drove across the parking lot and pulled out onto the street. “Are you going to be alright on your own tonight?” she asked after a long moment. She sounded deeply concerned for his wellbeing, which made Rupert feel all the more strongly that he was an absolutely worthless excuse for a human being.

“Yes,” he replied woodenly, “I’ll be alright.”

The prospect of facing the coming night alone chilled him deep within his soul, but he was not fool enough to suggest that she return to his home with him, or worse still he to hers. Among other very good reasons, it was beginning to dawn on him that, according to the Law of the State of California, he had just committed a very serious crime.

He was suddenly struck with a vision of an event which he had not witnessed himself but had heard Buffy recount many times with pride and admiration: Joyce Summers brandishing an ax and commanding a snarling demon, ‘You get the Hell away from my daughter! Nobody lays a hand on my little girl!’

They drove on until the silence between them once again became embarrassingly long. “I... um... I had Willow do the spell,” Buffy said finally. “On your house. He won’t be back.”

“That’s a small mercy, I suppose,” Giles mumbled distractedly. Immediately he felt a great fool and ingrate for such a tepid response to the news that these school kids with whom he had surrounded himself had once again gone above and beyond the call of duty to protect him from evil forces from which he should have been shielding them. “That is... I mean... thank you. That was... erm... very good thinking, to get that taken care of. Good work.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Buffy dryly. Then, gently, she added, “I just want you to be safe. I meant what I said. I can’t lose you.”

Giles’ heart swelled with affection and regret. “Oh, Buffy...” he began, but there was no way to finish the thought. Nothing he could say would change the fact that he had done her a grave disservice, that he had used her to take the place of his absent love, that he had only been able to do so because she felt dependent on him and responsible for Jenny’s death.

Besides, he reminded himself, he’d already said too much. Suppressing a sigh, he let the matter rest and tried to concentrate on driving. The drive went on forever in oppressive silence. Yet, too soon, they pulled to a stop in front of the house on Revello Drive.

Buffy reached to open her door and suddenly, desperately, he wanted her to stay. He could not let her get out of the car. He couldn’t bear the thought of it. Quickly, he grabbed her hand, squeezed it.

“Buffy I—” he found himself saying yet again. He stopped himself yet again. I what? Need you? Want you? (yet again) Love you? All of these things were true, but not true enough, not in the right way. “I... can’t do this without you either,” he finished haltingly, which at least, _was_ true enough. “Thank you, for saving me,” he added, wanting to have something more to say.

Buffy looked towards the house. Joyce stood watching them from the brightly lit front window. “I’ll... um... call you tomorrow,” she said nervously, “you know, just to see how you are.”

“Thanks,” he replied warmly, feeling truly grateful, “I’d like that.”

Buffy pushed her car door the rest of the way open, clearly signaling her intent to leave. Letting go of her hand felt like losing his grip on a lifeline, but he did it, forcing a smile.

*****

“So,” Cordelia panted teasingly, leaning close against Xander’s bare chest, “what should we do with the rest of the night?”

Xander grinned blissfully. “I’m exhausted,” he murmured against her hair. “Unbelievably happy, but exhausted.”

“Well, I can’t go home,” said Cordelia matter-of-factly, her breathing already returning to normal. “My parents think I’m staying over at Harmony’s.”

“Harmony’s?” Xander asked incredulously.

“I find it helps to keep them a little behind on my social life,” Cordelia explained lightly.

“But what if they try to check,” Xander worried aloud, “won’t Harmony rat you out?”

Cordelia shrugged, “They haven’t checked to make sure I was at Harmony’s at any point in the past ten years. I’d say it’s a calculated risk.” Cordelia sighed again, a little sadly, Xander thought. He ignored it, hoping he was imagining something that wasn’t there.

“I can’t go to my house either,” he pointed out. “I’m supposed to be at Willow’s comforting her after... after, you know, everything.”

Cordelia was quiet for a moment, thoughtful. “Maybe we should go check on Giles,” she mused. “I mean, I’m sure Buffy would have called if he was... I don’t know, dead or something. But that still doesn’t mean he’s alright.”

“I don’t know, Cordy,” Xander yawned. “It’s like, one in the morning. Maybe we should let him get some sleep.”

“Sleep?” said Cordelia, a sarcastic edge to her voice, “In the bed where his girlfriend was found brutally murdered like six hours ago?”

“Or on the couch maybe?” Xander suggested hopefully, near passing out himself.

Cordelia, was assaulted by the memory of Kevin Barker’s lifeless body tumbling infinitely towards her through the half open door of the AV room during the longest tenth of a second in the history of her Universe. She saw in microscopic detail the two tiny wounds through which the life had been sucked out of him.

“Trust me,” she said “he’s not asleep.”

*****

“Was that Mr. Giles?” Joyce asked as Buffy fairly sprinted past her into the house. Then, registering her hurry to be elsewhere, she called to her retreating back, “Buffy, are you okay?”

Buffy deliberately put a few stairs behind her before calling out, “Fine, Mom.” She knew her mom was too used to this recurrent lie to argue. After all the drama of the day, Joyce took the hint and let her be, probably assuming she was just upset over Miss Calendar’s murder. Buffy felt a fresh stab of guilt at using the dead woman in this way, to cover her own transgression. As if her mother could possibly have any inkling of what had happened!

Buffy needed to be alone, she told herself. She needed to clear her mind, to sleep, to pretend that none of the events of the last two days, or the last two months had ever happened. Yet when she got to her room and saw that Willow was there after all, she was flooded with relief.

“Oh, Wil,” she gasped, “Thank God you’re here.”

“I couldn’t just go home,” Willow explained. “I had to make sure you were okay. Are you? Okay?” She asked doubtfully, taking in Buffy’s disheveled appearance. Buffy’s face was streaked with tears and soot. Her hair was dirty and disarranged. Her clothes were rumpled and... misbuttoned?

“No,” Buffy said shaking her head, “I’m not okay.” There were tears in her eyes. “I... just made a really big mistake... and now everything is bad, and I don’t know what to do.”

Panic clouded Willow’s face, “Oh, Buffy, is Giles... he didn’t... Angel didn’t ... I mean he’s not...?”

“No, no” Buffy reassured her, her tone oddly ironic, “Giles is definitely alive. I got there just in time. The fang gang got away clean, but the factory is history. He burned it down!” This last revelation was stated with stark amazement. Willow was amazed herself.

“Why would Angel...?”

“Not Angel,” Buffy corrected, “Giles.”

“Wow,” Willow breathed, stunned. “Arson. That’s a side of him we’ve never seen before. He’s like a whole new Giles...or...you know... a whole old...Giles,” she reflected, “I mean... he _is_ the same person that Ethan Rayne insists on calling ‘Ripper.’ I guess he didn’t get that name by being the biggest perfectionist in his sewing circle after all.”

A sharp laugh escaped Buffy’s lips. She buried her face in her hands, ashamed to look Willow in the eye. “He’s... not himself...” she said finally, “And I ... I’m such an idiot and everything’s a mess... because... because,” Buffy was really crying now, “we’re still in love with _them_ and not with each other, and it’s all just wrong and stupid and pointless!” Buffy flung herself face down on her bed and sobbed.

Now Willow was confused as well as concerned. Buffy’s words, her actions, even her appearance seemed to imply... something impossible. “Buffy,” Willow asked hopefully, desperately clinging to her doubts, “I think maybe you must have breathed in some kind of fumes... from the fire. You’re... not making sense.”

Buffy forced herself to look into Willow’s eyes. “I slept with him,” she said. She was so matter-of-fact about it that Willow, suddenly relieved, thought she must be misinterpreting the whole thing, seeing a new grief where there was only a fresh welling of an old one.

“Well, yeah” she acknowledged, “and I know you feel badly about everything that’s happened since, but you can’t keep beating yourself up for what Angel does. You’re not res—”

“No, Wil,” Buffy cut in, starting to feel exasperated at having to repeat herself, at having to put such a fine point on her shame. “Not Angel. I slept with Giles.”

Willow struggled not to understand what she was hearing. “You sle— You mean you dosed off... in... in his car?” Buffy just looked at her as if to say, _come on, even you can’t be that innocent_. Willow scrunched up her face involuntarily. “Oh, Buffy,” she said with distaste, disappointment; then, again, with concern, pity, vicarious regret, “Oh Buffy.”

Willow took a moment to try to stuff the idea of Buffy and Giles... together... into her head. Buffy looked up at her miserably, needing best-friendly support that she was still struggling to feel. “Well, okay,” she assayed finally, trying to reassure herself as well as Buffy that everything was still more or less normal and not horribly, horribly wrong, “that was a bad decision, but we all make bad decisions, you know, from time to time...”

The high pitched squeaking in Willow’s voice wasn’t helping she realized, but there was no way to keep it out. She whimpered miserably, completely spun no matter how hard she tried not to be. Predictably, this did not have the effect of making Buffy feel better about what had happened.

Buffy clutched at Willow’s hands, panicked, as if she had only just realized the enormity of what she had revealed. “No one can know about this,” she half begged, half demanded, “Wil, promise me you won’t tell anyone, not even Oz and especially not Xander. Not even Giles can know that you know. Willow, promise me!”

“Of course,” Willow assured her, with a sinking feeling in her stomach, “I won’t tell a soul.”

Of course she would keep Buffy’s secret. She had kept Buffy’s secrets before. But falling in love with a two-hundred-year-old vampire was... other worldly... Gothicly romantic. It was the kind of secret that made a girl feel... tingly. Sleeping with a forty-year-old librarian was... after-school-specially. It was the kind of secret that made a girl feel... creepy.

“How...?” Willow couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Why...? What _happened_?”

Buffy shrugged, wiping her eyes, seeming to get a handle on her emotions. “Seemed like a good idea at the time?” More seriously, she added, “Wil, you didn’t see him. When I dragged him out of the factory, I didn’t know if he was dead or alive. Then, when I could see that he was coming to, I just felt so... so...”

“Relieved?” Willow guessed.

“Angry,” Buffy said firmly, “Terrified. There he was rushing off to die for... _her_ after everything that she—And I needed him... and he was... I almost lost him,” Buffy concluded, speaking barely above a whisper. She sighed deeply. “I really didn’t know what I was feeling. We were just kind of holding each other... at first... and I guess things kind of ... escalated...”

Buffy buried her face in her hands again. Willow shifted uncomfortably. “Look, Buffy,” she said, “It's way past midnight. Why don’t we try to get some sleep? Maybe in the morning you’ll feel a little better, not a lot maybe, but a little, and you... and... and Giles can talk things out... at least get some clarity on ... where you stand.”

“Yeah,” Buffy agreed halfheartedly, “maybe your right...” But she _was_ troubled about where she stood with Giles. Very troubled. He had said he loved her; then, moments later, he had been too ashamed even to look at her.

How much did it actually mean for a guy to say ‘I love you’ at that _exact_ moment, she wondered. Angel had said she had a lot to learn about men, and Buffy realized it was true.

Of course, Angel had also said he loved her... the morning after. In his case, it had been a cruel joke, but then, she reminded herself, he was an evil, soulless demon who delighted in causing her pain. But Giles was... _Giles_. She could hardly believe he would have said something like that if he hadn’t meant it.

What if she had misread him altogether? What if he had jumped up, unable to look at her, because he felt rejected, because she hadn’t said it back?

Buffy struggled to put her concern into words. “I... I just don’t want to hurt him,” she explained. “I mean, how do you tell a... guy that you don’t think of him, _that way_ , you know, _after._ ”

“Well...” said Willow, shifting uncomfortably again, “That’s a _little_ outside my area of expertise, but I do know a thing or two about rejection, and I know it helps a lot if the other person is honest with you and shows that they care about your feelings.” After a moment's hesitation she added, “Just, don’t tell him you’re still in love with Angel.”

Buffy felt a sudden flush of anger, “I’m not—!” she began to protest, but she knew better. “Okay, I am,” she admitted, “but the Angel I love is dead. He’s gone forever, just the same as Miss Calendar is. I don’t think I really understood that until tonight.”

“My God,” Willow gasped, her eyes going round with horror. For a moment Buffy assumed she had only been struck once again by the reality of Miss Calendar’s murder. Then, Willow gave her a serious, searching look. She opened her mouth as if to say something but hesitated, seeming to think better of it.

“Wil,” Buffy asked, slightly unnerved, “What?”

“Buffy,” she whined, repositioning herself slightly, so that they were looking at one another in profile rather than full in the face, “I don’t mean to be a cynic, and maybe you don’t want to hear this, but maybe it’s yourself you should be worried about protecting.”

Buffy felt puzzled and somehow, indefinably insulted. "What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, Giles didn’t go to the factory looking for... a shoulder to cry on. He went there looking for revenge... on Angel... for killing the woman he loved. I mean in... evolutionary terms... when one... male takes away another male’s... mate...”

“No!” said Buffy emphatically. “I get what you’re saying, and no. Giles isn’t using me to... score points on Angel. He’s not—He wouldn’t—”

“Buffy,” Willow persisted gently, “You just said he wasn’t himself. I mean, Giles is a good man, I know that, and he cares about you, really he does. But, Buffy, he is still a man, which is to say an ape, which is to say a big, hairy male animal.”

“So, you’re saying... what, exactly?”

“I’m saying, take a tiny step to conclusions, here.” Willow warned. “Don’t be too disappointed if Giles doesn’t mind being ‘rejected’ as much as you might think.”

Buffy sighed deeply. She loved Willow, and Willow was very smart, but she was not sure how much stock she could place in the relationship advice of a socially awkward virgin who had really only been dating for a few weeks.

*****

It was nearly two o’clock when they arrived at Giles doorstep. “I don’t know about this, Cordy,” Xander objected for the hundredth time, hesitating with his hand an inch from the doorbell. Granted every light in the house was on, but still, coming here seemed... intrusive.

Cordelia made a noise that perfectly communicated her disgust and contempt for his cowardice. Shoving Xander out of the way, she leaned her palm against the doorbell so that it emitted a continuous buzzing within.

Several minutes passed before they heard the faint sound of shuffling, hesitant footsteps. The hoarse, unsteady voice of Rupert Giles murmured through the door, “Buffy... Is that you?”

“Hardly,” Cordelia scoffed. “It’s me and Xander. Let us in so we can make sure you’re not in there hanging yourself or something.”

“Make sure I’m not...” Giles’ tone escalated rapidly from bewildered through incredulous to indigent to angry. “Cordelia!” he shouted through the door, “Go away!”

“Giles,” Xander implored, “could you please just let us in? It’s way too late to go home and we need a place to crash.”

Giles opened the door. “I am not running a... hotel, Mr. Harris,” he nearly snarled in his snidest, most superior, brilliant-teacher-put-up-on-by-idiotic-student voice. But his eyes were puffy, his hair disheveled, and his more than usually lined face streaked with grime and tears.

“Oh please,” said Cordelia, rolling her eyes, trying to squeeze past him. But she jumped back quickly as his fist slammed into the wall, inches from her face, blocking her from invading his home.

“Cordelia, Xander,” Giles crooned, between a purr and a hiss, refined yet menacing, “I will see you both on Monday. Please. Have a pleasant morning. SOMEWHERE ELSE!”

“Come on, Cordy,” Xander pleaded, gently tugging his stunned girlfriend back over the threshold, out of striking distance of the madman they had so unwisely disturbed at this hour.

*****

Willow was dead to the world when the gray light of dawn filtered through the bedroom window, waking Buffy from none too peaceful a sleep. Silence still hung like cobwebs throughout the house, telling her she was the first to stir. Dressing quickly in Capris and a tank top, Buffy walked out into the Saturday morning sunshine.

She wandered aimlessly, hoping to clear her head; but it refused to be cleared. Jenny Calendar was dead. Angel was responsible. Buffy was responsible. Giles was devastated and alone. She wanted to be there for him, but she couldn’t imagine being in a relationship with him.

That was not her only problem. Or at least, it might not be. Her mother’s question from last night rang in her ears, “Were you careful?”

Buffy laughed ruefully at herself, suddenly reminded of what Xander had said last year after following her down into a vampire infested sewer to try to save Jesse. When she’d asked why he hadn’t bothered to bring a simple cross, let alone a blade or a stake, he’d answered with his usual aplomb, “The part of my brain that would tell me to bring those things is still busy telling me not to come down here.” The part of Buffy’s brain that would have told her to be ‘careful’ also would have told her not to sleep with Giles.

Buffy knew that she needed to talk to Giles. She also knew that she didn’t want to call him from her home and risk her mom or even Willow overhearing. Yet, she couldn’t seem to make her footsteps wander in the direction of his apartment. It wasn’t because she had any anxiety about seeing him or being alone with him she told herself. She just couldn’t face returning to the scene of a murder for which she knew in her heart she was mostly responsible.

*****

Willow was rudely yanked from sleep by the ringing phone at Buffy’s bedside. She hesitated a moment, then picked up. She didn’t even get the chance to say ‘hello’.

“Buffy?!” Giles cried out, his voice desperate and shaken.

Willow did her best to suppress a sudden, furious wave of anger that welled up within her at the sound of him. “No.” she said, shocked by the hard tone of her own voice, then, deliberately softer, “It’s Willow. I... just woke up, but I can see if Buffy is here.”

“Would you, please?” said Giles gratefully. “I... I need to talk to her, right away.”

Her heart went out to him, really... most of it. But she still held a firm conviction that someone—not Rupert Giles—should be looking out for Buffy.

Laying the receiver on the bed, she walked across the room to dutifully peer out into the empty hallway. “Buffy, telephone,” she called softly. No response, of course. “I’m sorry,” she told Giles, returning to the phone after what she judged was a decent interval. “She must have left while I was still asleep.”

She heard Giles's muffled cursing through the hand he’d placed over his mouthpiece. “Did she have any... erm plans for today?” He asked, unsuccessfully trying to sound casual.

Willow felt guilty but no less resolved. “I’m not sure,” she hedged, which was true, “I have to go soon,” which was not, “but I’ll let her know you called... if I see her,” a blatant lie.

Giles’ tone sharpened slightly, despite his best efforts. “Willow,” he asked, “Did Buffy tell you anything... erm... strange... about last night?”

“No!” she said much too quickly, then “I have to go now! Bye!” She slammed down the phone. That had not gone well. Giles wasn’t an idiot. He had to know that she knew _something_ about last night. He could probably guess that she knew everything.

*****

Buffy sat alone at one of the outside tables in front of the Espresso Pump, staring glassily out at the traffic, sipping her fifth Mochachino. As Willow sat down opposite, she looked up and sighed. “Just happened to be passing by?” she asked.

Willow shook her head. “I’ve been looking for you for hours,” she admitted. “I’m worried about you.”

“Yeah,” said Buffy, “I’m worried about me too.”

“Have you talked to Giles?”

“No, I was just trying to get my courage up to go over there.”

“Maybe you should call him,” Willow suggested, her voice high pitched and forcibly bright, “you know, on the phone.”

“Wil,” said Buffy with mild annoyance, “I’m not afraid to be alone with Giles. I know... what happened before can never happen again. I just think I ought to tell him in person. It seems like the grown-up thing to do. I can’t say I’m looking forward to going over there, though.” Buffy looked down thoughtfully at her coffee.

“Are you really worried he’s going to feel... rejected?” Willow asked.

Buffy shrugged, “Honestly? I figure he’ll deal. He’s going to be way more upset about Miss Calendar’s murder than anything to do with me. I’m really more worried about... what’s already happened.”

“Well... what’s done is done,” Willow pointed out, feeling inept for having nothing better to say.

“True,” Buffy murmured pensively, “but that doesn’t mean there might not be... consequences.”

“Such as?” Willow asked.

Buffy looked at her nervously, “I’m worried I could be pregnant.”

Willow was shocked. Then she was shocked at herself for being shocked. Why hadn’t she thought of such an obvious problem? She was such an idiot! “Wow, Buffy,” she stammered, “I never—I mean, Giles is so... responsible. I guess—I mean, I would have thought—”

“Wil, neither of us was thinking clearly,” Buffy reminded her miserably. “If we had been… none of this would be happening.”

“It’s, okay, Buffy,” Willow tried to reassure her, though she was far from convinced that things were in fact ‘okay’. “Anyway,” she went on, remembering a few things she had read, “you can’t be pregnant in ten hours. It takes two or three days.”

“But there’s nothing you can do to stop it from happening,” Buffy pointed out, “you know, after the fact.”

“Actually, I’m not sure that’s true,” Willow said. She wasn’t positive, but she thought she had read on the internet that you could take something right after sex to keep from getting pregnant. It seemed like there was a political controversy about it, in France or somewhere.

“Seriously?” Buffy asked hopefully. “Is there really something I can do?”

“I don’t know,” Willow admitted, “but I know how to find out. My parents have tons of medical books. And we can look on the net,” she suggested seeming to warm to the idea. “You could come over now. Mom’s at a conference, and Dad’s probably at the clinic.”

“I don’t know, Wil,” Buffy said. For once, heading into deep research mode actually sounded like a relatively attractive option, but she knew she was just putting off the inevitable. “At this point, it kind of feels like I’m avoiding Giles. I mean, I told him I would call him this morning, and it’s already after ten.”

Willow looked disappointed. “Tell, you what,” Buffy suggested. “Why don’t you start researching, and I’ll come over later and help.”

“Well, okay,” said Willow, trying to think positive, realizing that Buffy was set on her decision to see Giles. “You can stop by Giles’s real quick, then come on over and we can research and have lunch.”

Buffy made a non-committal noise. She was not at all sure that the things she and Giles had to talk about could or should be dealt with that quickly.

*****

Giles opened the door before Buffy could even ring the bell. “Thank God you’re here,” he declared breathlessly. He looked worse than she’d ever seen him, worse even than the time she had found him slumped over a bottle, wallowing in self-pity over Jenny’s possession by Eyghon.

Now, as then, he had been drinking and had not changed his clothes from the night before. But this time he rushed to put his arms around her and guide her into his living room. She was glad that he was glad to see her, but seeing him in this state was a little frightening, and his hand grasping her shoulder made her feel uneasy.

“I haven’t slept a wink,” he informed her earnestly, confirming her misgivings. Buffy smiled nervously in response. His eyes were shining.

He led her to the sofa, and they sat, making sure to put about eighteen inches of space between them, though she felt foolish for doing so. “I didn’t sleep well either,” she said, mostly to fill the silence that followed. Then, impulsively, she voiced her uncensored concern. “Giles, you have to get a hold of yourself. If the police see you acting so... guilty, they’re going to think you killed Miss Calendar.”

“Well thanks a lot,” Giles scoffed, his voice suddenly brittle, “that cheers me right up(!)”

“Look,” she said, feeling responsible for the events that had led to the rawness of his emotions, “I’m sorry. I didn’t come here to fight. I’m just... worried about you.”

Giles gave her a miserable, regretful look, then busied his eyes and hands with the ritualistic cleaning of his glasses. “I’m sorry, Buffy,” he apologized, “I don’t mean to... snap at you. God knows you’re going through... all of this as much as I am.”

Then he paused and forced himself to look her in the eye. “But let me come to the point,” he said, “before I lose my nerve. About... last night: I don’t really know how to ask you this, but... you haven’t... told anyone have you... about... what happened between us?”

Now it was Buffy’s turn to look pointedly away. “Willow knows,” she admitted, gazing with apparent interest down at her folded hands in her lap. “But, I swear to you,” she continued, trying harder to maintain eye contact, “I won’t tell anyone else and neither will she.”

“Well,” Giles responded, unable to keep a slightly corrective note out of his voice, “I wish you hadn’t told anyone at all, but I suppose you have to confide in someone, and I have every confidence that Willow can be trusted, if anyone can.

“Look, Buffy,” he went on, sounding less pedantic, though no less strained, “I feel like a complete scoundrel asking you to keep a secret like this. Unfortunately, the State of California, not to mention the INS, takes this erm... sort of thing fairly seriously.”

“This sort of thing,” Buffy repeated quietly, not much liking the sound of it.

Giles sighed heavily, “I _am_ a complete scoundrel, by the way,” he informed her with a small, sad smile, “just so you know.” Buffy laughed nervously, not sure if he was joking. “Buffy,” he resumed, sounding gently serious, “there are other things we need to discuss about last night besides... erm information security.”

“Yes, there are,” she agreed, her stomach flip-flopping sickeningly at the thought of what she had to say next.

“Buffy,” he went on, “you know I’m a very serious person. I very rarely act purely on impulse—”

“Yeah, I know,” Buffy began, “and—”

“Please,” Giles cut in, “let me finish. I know—despite any remarks I may have made in the past about your youth or your... comportment—I know that you are a very serious person too, a very... honorable person, and I deeply, deeply respect that—”

“Giles,” Buffy interrupted more forcefully, unwilling to let him climb any further out onto the limb, “I’m not in love with you.”

“Oh good lord, that’s a relief!” Giles gasped, breaking into a sheepish smile.

Buffy felt an unexpected stab of resentment. “It is?” she asked, baffled.

Giles sighed, “Oh Buffy, I _do_ love you, very, very much, but not... I’m not _romantically_ in love with you, and, well, after last night... I was worried that...well... considering everything that was said and... done between us... I couldn’t stand the thought of... of breaking your heart... on top of everything else.”

“Oh,” said Buffy not sure what else to say. So she guessed that answered her question. When a man said, ‘I love you,’ apparently, it didn’t mean all that much.


	2. The Experience Project

Willow shut off her laptop, lay back on her bed among dozens of scattered books and journals and sighed. After five hours of research, she had a lot of information, but few answers.

She had learned that there was a veritable cornucopia of emergency contraceptive products on the market in Europe. But the news media found it far more interesting to talk about the political and social implications of this than what they were made of or how they worked.

The scientific journals explained that in great detail, that is, if you already knew practically everything about traditional hormonal contraceptives. Willow only knew in general what was involved. It would take her three days to read up on everything she needed to know to fully understand what she was reading now.

The one thing she understood most keenly; however, was that Buffy did not have three days. Whatever kind of pills you took had to be taken within 72 hours at the very latest. 48 hours was better. As soon as possible was best. The Buffy/Giles clock had been ticking for over 16 hours, and Willow was not even close to the kind of solid information that would tell her how many of which pills Buffy needed.

If they had actually been in Europe, Buffy could have bought a packet of pills at a pharmacy and followed the directions on the label. In the United States, however, a doctor was needed to examine the patient and write a prescription. Which would have gotten Joyce involved. Of course, with two doctors in the house, Willow knew that she could get her hands on a prescription pad. The problem was, she wouldn’t know what to prescribe.

Willow wished for the millionth time this afternoon that Buffy would contact her. As if in answer to her wish, the doorbell rang. It was Buffy. If only she had wished for the pills and instructions she needed, thought Willow wryly.

“Well?” asked Buffy anxiously as she hurried inside, “did you find anything?” There was an odor about her that said she had been indulging in a little daytime sewer hunting. A good strategy for temporary stress relief. If you didn’t mind the high risk of being permanently killed.

Willow tried, unsuccessfully, to smile. “I’m making progress,” she said, “but not fast enough. I know that we’re talking about basically the same stuff that’s in regular birth control pills, but I’m still working on how much of what kind to use.”

“Well,” Buffy said, “that’s a start.” Then, pensively, she added, “What is the time frame, anyway?”

“72 hours,” said Willow. “Which is now 55 hours. That’s just the most time we might have though. Some studies say 48 hours.”

“Which really means 31,” Buffy murmured, sucking her bottom lip between her teeth thoughtfully, “by tomorrow night.”

Willow nodded. “We have to get help,” she pleaded, “Even if I steal my Dad’s prescription pad, I don’t think I can figure out what to write by tomorrow night.”

Buffy was touched by Willow’s willingness to help her, even to the point of breaking the law and risking serious trouble with her parents. “We’ll figure it out,” she found herself trying to reassure her friend. “You’ve already found out more about it than Giles knew.”

Buffy and Willow froze and locked eyes. It was obvious how they were going to get the answers to their questions.

“We should call Giles,” Willow said aloud. Buffy nodded. Who better to ask a grownup for grown-up advice than another grownup? Giles could stroll right up to a doctor or pharmacist and casually ask them for help. Because people his age were supposed to be sexually active.

Buffy reached for the phone next to the couch, only to be stopped by the sound of a key turning in the door. “...From your house,” Willow added, completing her earlier sentence.

“Agreed,” said Buffy.

Unfortunately, the short, bespectacled man who was coming through the front door made it impossible for them to get away in anything like a hurry. Ira Rosenberg was as friendly and effervescent as his wife was distant and abstracted. He ran to his daughter and caught her in a big bear hug, then held her out at arm’s length and boomed, “How is my dear Willow this fine, sunny Sabbath day?”

“I’m great, Dad,” Willow beamed back at him. Knowing that Dr. Rosenberg rarely made it home from work before 10pm, even on a Saturday and that Willow often wished desperately that he would, Buffy tried to be unobtrusive, to let them have their moment. It was not to be.

Although this was their first meeting, beyond a glimpse or two in the school parking lot, Ira jumped right in to a conversation with Buffy, apparently already in progress. “Is it a sin?” he asked in a loud, jovial voice, “to do the Lord’s work on the Lord’s day?”

“I ... wouldn’t think so...?” Buffy managed, taken aback.

“This new Rabbi, Rabbi Mike, he says I should close my clinic on the Sabbath. He says work is work, whatever the benefit to mankind.”

Buffy smiled weakly. This seemed to be all that was required of her at this interval.

“So,” Dr. Rosenberg continued, every bit as cheerfully, “I asked him, ‘Rabbi, if God made me a healer, and healing is a sacred art, what better way to keep the Sabbath holy than to use my God given talents for the benefit of my fellow man?’ Then he says to me, ‘It sounds like you’ve been reading the _Christian_ scriptures.’

"So I said, ‘I’ll read anything once.’ But honestly, this young Rabbi, how did he get to be such an expert? He’s from Elmwood for Heck’s sake. He used to ride skateboards and smoke pot with my brother’s two boys. He spends ten minutes on a Kibbutz one summer and bam, anyone who has the slightest disagreement with him is suddenly a Christian.”

“Umm...” said Buffy, sneaking a look at Willow for guidance on how to react. She had never met anyone in all her life who could complain so cheerfully. He seemed positively gleeful. Although, Buffy _was_ beginning to get why Willow had been so worried about nailing crucifixes to her bedroom wall, even for the very worthy purpose of keeping out vampires.

“Dad,” said Willow, apparently coming to her rescue, “Buffy was just telling me how much she admires the neoclassical bronzes in the foyer.”

Buffy did a mental doubled take. What kind of a bail was that? Willow’s father was looking at her expectantly. Admittedly, she knew more about art than religion, but still.

There was only so much you could say about moderately priced reproductions of generic neoclassical bronzes, not that she could remember any of it at the moment. “The forms are so... kinetic,” she finally managed, remembering that at least one of the figures had been engaged in some vaguely athletic activity.

“Well, then,” said Dr. Rosenberg brightly, “If that’s the kind of thing you like, you should see the ones in my study.”

“What a great idea!” Willow enthused, “Let’s go look at them right now!” Next to anyone but her father, she would have appeared positively manic.

“Sounds like fun,” Buffy agreed weakly, forcing a smile. Clearly this had something to do with Willow’s plans to lay her hands on her father’s prescription pad. In the service of that endeavor, Buffy managed to keep Ira engaged in a steady stream of very small talk about some fairly small and uninteresting statues for what seemed like at least an hour.

Finally, Willow emerged from somewhere outside her father’s line of sight saying, “Buffy, I think we’d better get going. The movie starts at 5:45. We don’t want to be late.”

“Oh,” said Ira excitedly, “you mean that new sci-fi flick over at the Sun Cinema? I’ve been dying to see that! We’ll all go, my treat!”

“Actually,” Buffy apologized, “It’s that new romantic comedy over at the Mall Twin.”

“Ah, yes,” Ira boomed, “I’ve been meaning to see that too. It’s the one with the girl and the guy,” he grinned, “who get into a situation in a place and then do things.”

“The very one,” Buffy confirmed grimly. She did not have time for this. She could practically feel herself ovulating.

“My treat _and_ I’ll buy you girls dinner,” said Dr. Rosenberg, “that’s my final offer.”

Buffy had just opened her mouth, uncertain what excuse was about to come out of it, when she heard Willow say, “Thanks Dad, that’s a great idea. Buffy, isn’t that a great idea?” The look in Willow’s eyes said, _just go with it, I’ll explain later_.

*****

The sun was low in the west. Late afternoon slipped into evening. As Ira Rosenberg pulled his late model white Lexis into the moderately crowded Mall parking lot, he felt content and more than usually cheerful.

It was nice to get out for the evening, to leave work behind and to spend a little time with his daughter for once. It was nice to finally meet her charming young friend Buffy, whom she so clearly admired, and who seemed to be singlehandedly responsible for expanding her social circle to include multiple actual friends.

Ira whistled cheerfully as he stepped round to the passenger side to open the door for his daughter with an elaborate bow that made Willow giggle. Buffy let herself out of the back seat, shrugging into the lime green sweater vest she had borrowed from Willow to stave off the very slight chill of a winter evening in Southern California, and stood looking at them skeptically.

Ira bowed all the more deeply. “Forgive me, dear lady,” he said with mock gravity. “I am a very old man and cannot open doors as quickly as I once could.”

“It’s totally cool,” said Buffy as cheerfully as she could manage.

“A quality to which, I assure you, I have never aspired,” Ira retorted, eyes twinkling merrily. Willow twinkled back at him. Buffy forced a weak smile. It was all she could do to keep from saying ‘whatever’ in that special way that means, ‘shut up and stop being an idiot.’

She didn’t want to be rude to Willow’s father. She knew he was in no way responsible for her tense mood. But, she _was_ in a tense mood, and his needlessly theatrical jollity annoyed her more than a little. She was also beginning to have a fairly clear sense of what (or who) Willow saw in Xander.

Of course, Buffy realized, with genuine if bleak amusement, she had no room to judge anyone on the issue of all things Freudian. She let herself laugh a little, let Willow and her dad think she was laughing with them.

Ira kept up a steady stream of lame jokes and Willow a corresponding stream of insipid fawning all the way through the lot and the mall and into the theater. Buffy walked a couple of paces behind them, trying to stay out of the line of comic fire. She hoped to God that Willow had brought her here for a good reason having to do with an actual plan to help her get out of this mess.

Predictably, when they got to the ticket window, there was some confusion over the fact that there was no 5:45 showing for the chick flick de jure at the Mall Twin. Buffy died a little as the good doctor cheerfully purchased three tickets for the next showing at 7:15.

Finally, she managed to drag Willow away to the ladies room, enduring the inevitable bevy of jokes about the supposed female habit of going to the bathroom in pairs. The moment she was sure they were alone in the restroom, Buffy locked the door, turned to Willow and said: “Okay, so tell me how this is all part of some amazingly brilliant plan to keep me from getting pregnant.”

“Well,” said Willow, shifting uncomfortably, “I got the prescription pad, but I need a little time to trace my dad’s signature from the indention in the paper.”

Buffy tried to suppress her annoyance, to give her friend the benefit of the doubt. “And we aren’t at my house, right now, doing that because... why exactly?” she asked.

“It’s easier to do when you have the whole pad, not just the one sheet,” Willow explained. “The indentions are deeper.”

“And?” said Buffy skeptically.

“I know my dad,” Willow argued. “If he’s alone in the house too long, he’ll start _organizing_ things. If the prescription pad is missing, he won’t rest until he finds it. This way, I can keep him busy until I’m ready to put it back.”

Buffy had to admit that this made a degree of sense.  But she was still convinced that more than half of the reason they were here was simply because Willow could not pass up the chance to spend time with her father.

“Okay,” Buffy said, thinking fast, “Here’s the plan. You go ahead and get started on the signature. Your Dad will start to wonder why we’re taking so long, but that’s fine, because as soon as we’ve got that done, we can go back and tell him I’m sick, and you guys can take me home. You go on to the movies with your dad, and I’ll call Giles and get him moving on the whole dosage issue, got it?”

Willow nodded, carefully drying the bathroom countertop with a paper towel before setting to work. “At least the light’s good in here,” she said, “this shouldn’t take too long.”

“Good,” said Buffy, relaxing only slightly. “I’m ready for this to be over with.”

“Um huh...” said Willow, concentrating on her work.

“I mean, my life isn’t complicated enough with my murdering vampire ex-boyfriend telling my _mom_ every last detail of how I lost my virginity?” Buffy went on, fidgeting giving way to pacing, “No, I have to go and make things _really_ interesting by sleeping with my Watcher!”

“Muh hum,” mumbled Willow, more or less encouragingly.

Buffy continued her soliloquy. “Which you’d think, at least, being a sophisticated man of the world or whatever, he’d know how to avoid... complications like this. I mean, is it just me,” Buffy asked rhetorically, pacing faster, unable to keep still, “or should Giles have already known all about this? I mean if it’s a simple has taking extra birth control pills? He lived through the sixties or whatever. How can he not know this stuff?”

“He’s a guy,” Willow pointed out distractedly, not looking up from her work. “This is girl stuff.”

“Yeah,” said Buffy, “but why is that exactly? I mean, this is his screw-up as much as it is mine, right? So why is it my job to fix it and not his?”

Three feet above their heads, concealed behind a thin layer of ceiling panels, Angel crouched in the darkness and smiled. His smile got broader with every additional word of confirmation that they meant exactly what they seemed to mean.

This was just too much. He never ceased to delight in the depths of human depravity or in the intimate association between loving someone and making them miserable. Thinking of the pompous, self consciously ‘good’ Rupert Giles, with his well meaning notions of duty and honor, pluming those depths and inflicting such sweet misery was deliciously amusing.

It was even more amusing given the circumstances. Dear, sweet Jenny Calendar had been dead less than 24 hours. Their fumbling, bumbling, never to be consummated romance had been a comedy of errors that, even with the hindrance of a feeling human soul, Angel had been fully able to appreciate.

Now her body lay cold and broken in a drawer in the basement morgue of Sunnydale General. After all that yearning and burning, after so much maudlin, self indulgent agonizing about love and betrayal, after his suicidally stupid tantrum at the factory last night; that the great, dignified Watcher couldn’t keep his pants on long enough to get his ‘one true love’ in the ground was absolutely hilarious.

On another level, Angel was also angry. The part of him that still was and would always be the fleshly descendant of a tree dwelling primate wanted to get his hands on that meddling librarian and _explain_ to him in excruciating detail that Buffy wasn't his to torment.

But one advantage of being a soulless monster was that Angel truly _enjoyed_ being angry. It was nice to actually have something _against_ a potential victim. It made the whole process of anticipating, planning and consummating violence against them so much more meaningful.

And if, somewhere at the core of this delightful, cold burning rage was a primal spark of hot, human pain? Well, Angel could enjoy the pain of the broken vestiges of the creature once know as Liam as much as that of any other mortal.

Right now, however, Angel was mainly focused on causing pain to Buffy. He saw in this situation enormous potential to hurt and damage her in intimate and lasting ways. If he got to punish her new paramour in the process, that was just a bonus.

Buffy herself didn’t know how much danger she was in of actually conceiving the Watcher’s spawn. After more than a year of obsessing over the girl, Angel knew the rhythms of her body better than she did. He was aware of her heartbeat, her body temperature, every drop of blood that she had ever shed.

He also remembered a world she had no inkling of, a world in which men and women lived in constant dread of procreative forces over which they had little control. If he had had to wager on the odds of Buffy conceiving on the basis of his knowledge of those processes and his sense of the perversity of fate, he would have bet even money. Even if that possibility didn’t pan out, he wouldn’t mind causing her a few weeks of anxiety over the prospect.

Silently, Angel crept along the ceiling beams, into the space above the adjoining men’s restroom. It was clear that his enemies were in a race against time. All he had to do to hurt them was to slow them down. As usual, he knew just what to do to keep Buffy too busy to make other plans.

*****

Ira waited fifteen minutes. His good mood was waning a little. If there was one thing he hated to do, it was to wait, to be still. The worst feeling in the world was to feel bored.

He wished he’d asked the girls what they wanted to eat before they’d gone scampering off to reapply their make up from the foundation up. He could have just gone to the food court, picked something and ordered for everyone, but that’s what Sheila would have called ‘disempowering male presumption.’ Besides, at the rate things were going, the food might get cold before the kids got back.

Ira walked over to the restroom area.  He resisted the temptation to knock on the ladies’ room door and ask if everything was all right in there. With nothing better to do, he decided to go to the men’s room.

*****

Hanging like a bat inside the ceiling of the men’s room of the Mall Twin Theater, Angel peered down through a gap in the panels less than an inch wide. His unseen expression had become more serious. Minutes were ticking by. For his plan to work, he had to find a victim before Buffy and Willow finished _their_ work and left the rest room.

He didn’t dare strike in the lobby, or in the Mall proper, where the last rays of the setting sun would still be streaming through the glass doors, windows and skylights. Even indirect rays, though unlikely to kill a vampire, tended to sap his strength pretty quickly. In a fight with Buffy, that would amount to the same thing.

Not for the first time, he wished he had Spike’s high tolerance to sunlight. That yellow haired punk could soak up indirect rays like they were moonbeams. He knew it too, the cocky little spawn.

Even with his useless scorched and twisted legs, Spike though he was Angel’s better. He’d forgotten his place in the pecking order since Angel had been away. Drusilla, never a good disciplinarian, had let him act the part of the sire for too long. He'd even had the nerve to question Angel’s priorities in focusing the group’s energies on the systematic destruction of Buffy Summers.

Well, Angel was back now. He—not Spike—would set the agenda. He had set himself a goal of completely breaking Buffy before he killed her, and that was what he was going to do. Spike would learn to take orders and like it.

Of course, that was assuming his plans for tormenting Buffy could actually be put into action. Angel was tired of waiting. He was getting almost desperate enough to snatch Willow through the ceiling of the ladies’ room, when his next meal finally came strolling in, humming obliviously.

As he sized up his hapless victim, a broad grin spread across Angel’s face once more. This was too good to be true. The poor innocent fool who had stumbled across his path was Willow’s father, Dr. Ira Rosenberg.

Angel dove through the ceiling in full vamp face, lunging directly at the side of Rosenberg’s head, at an angle calculated to produce maximum terror. His efforts were rewarded with a satisfying scream, sure to bring Buffy, Willow and half the theater running.

Collapsing atop his prey, Angel sank in his fangs and quickly slurped down at least a pint of blood. Jumping to his feet, grinning excitedly, he jerked Ira up by the collar, threw him through the hole in the ceiling and leapt after him, just in time to hear Buffy and Willow bursting through the bathroom door in defiance of a security guard’s shouted order to stay back.

Angel didn’t dare to waist a moment listening to the commotion below. Herding Ira before him like a dog nipping at the heels of a frightened sheep, he headed towards the duct system that would lead them down to the basement where they could disappear into the sewers.

Intentionally or unintentionally, Ira leapt with all his weight onto a soft expanse of ceiling panels between two beams. If it weren’t for Angel’s superhuman reflexes, he would have fallen down into the lobby below. The vampire lunged and grabbed his prey with both hands, nearly falling through the ceiling himself. Tucking Ira under one arm, he used his remaining hand to regain his balance.

“Nice try Rosenberg,” he snarled, pausing for a quick drink. “Just for that, I’m not going to kill you all the way.” Angel smiled like a shark, eyes and bloody teeth glittering in the semi-darkness. “I’m going to leave you for Buffy.”

*****

As Buffy scuttled nimbly along the beams inside the ceiling of the Mall Twin, she was focused, energized, fueled by cold hatred that left no room for anger, fear or uncertainty. Angel had to be stopped. Dr. Rosenberg had to be saved, but most importantly, Angel had to die.

Suddenly, she heard scuffling and snarling only a few yards away. The darkness ahead of her got a little lighter. No more than twenty feet in front of her Angel and Dr. Rosenberg were silhouetted by a dim glow that Buffy now realized was coming from a hole where they had nearly fallen through to the lobby. Angel was biting Dr. Rosenberg savagely on the side of the head, punishing him, she supposed, for his near escape.

During the quarter minute or so that Angel stopped to savage his victim, Buffy closed most of the distance between them.  But she was still not within lunging distance in these tight quarters when Angel scrambled across the gap, dragging his now limp hostage after him.

Buffy stopped short. At five foot almost two, she could not simply lie across the hole and grab the beams on the other side as Angel had done, and she had no room to build momentum to leap over it. Instead, she hung from a rafter and swung across, losing nearly half a minute in the process.

Now more than thirty feet away, Angel and his victim disappeared around a corner in the once again deepening darkness of the crawl space. Buffy struggled to keep pace, unable to close the distance. She more than half expected to be ambushed coming around the corner, but they were gone.

She could have screamed with rage and frustration. For a moment they seemed to have literally disappeared. Then, she glimpsed the metal air duct in the near darkness.

The shaft was completely vertical and so narrow that anyone moving through it would have their arms pinned to their sides until they almost fully emerged. Going down that shaft knowing that Angel lay in wait below would be little short of suicide.

Buffy looked cautiously into the opening. She felt more than saw that it was very, very deep. They were in the basement by now, Buffy realized, no doubt headed for the sewer.

Not wanting to waste the time to find an existing opening, Buffy yanked aside a ceiling panel near the beam she was standing on, and swung herself down into the midst of an astonished crowd. Pushing her way through the throng, she headed for the elevator.

She glimpsed Willow across the cavernous room, screaming and crying hysterically as she struggled in vain to free herself from two beefy, red faced mall cops. There was no time to render aid.

The minute she looked at the elevator buttons, Buffy knew she would need a key to get out at the basement level. Scanning the nearer reaches of the crowd, she spotted an old man in green coveralls pushing a wheeled mop bucket. There was a big loop of keys on his belt.

“Sorry,” said Buffy, as she dragged the custodian into the elevator, pushing the button to close the doors and discouraging would be followers with an I-will-if-I-have-to look.

“Look... um... kid,” the man stammered, bewildered as well as frightened by her ability to drag him anywhere against his will.

“I just want the basement key,” Buffy explained. She had already pushed the button for parking one, which was as low as the box would go without the key.

“No, way!” the gray haired man replied, gaining confidence as he took in her youth and slight stature.

In less than a second the doors would open on parking one. Buffy hit the stop button and slammed the janitor against the wall with moderate force, knocking the wind out of him. Ripping the key’s from his belt and holding them in front of his face she said matter-of-factly, “Show me which key.”

With a trembling finger, he silently pointed it out. Buffy slid the key into the slot, and the elevator descended. “Don’t get off,” she warned, pushing the man behind her as the doors opened. “As soon as I get out, go back up.” The man nodded dumbly.

Once again, Buffy was prepared to step into an ambush, but the basement was deserted. She examined the floor and walls for signs of an access point to the sewer, certain she had no more than two or three minutes until security of some kind arrived to slow her down and complicate matters further.

She spied a pile of crates that seemed to have been flung rather than stacked against the far wall. Their contents were spilled and broken. Some of the crates were smeared with blood. Shoving the crates aside, Buffy found a loose grate and lifted it up.

A thin trail of fresh blood mingled with the sewage down the tunnel leading to her left. Buffy followed it without hesitation. Adrenaline was rushing through her veins as her heart pumped almost double time. They were close. She could feel it.

Running as fast as she dared in the perpetual slickness of the massive drain pipe, Buffy skidded around a corner and literally ran over Spike. “Oh God!” he cried out as she trod on his useless legs, “Please, please, Buffy, don’t hurt me.”

“What the—?” Buffy was too stunned to have a coherent thought.

“No, sod it,” Spike spat, scrambling into a sitting position against the wall. “Just kill me already. Make it quick.”

A thousand questions bubbled through Buffy’s brain, but the first to pop out of her mouth was, “Where’s your wheel chair?”

“He took it, din’ he,” said Spike bitterly, “along with every other bloody thing that used to be mine.”

Buffy felt an involuntary upwelling of pity for this helpless, degraded creature, but she quickly stuffed it back down. Pity was wasted on vampires. It was alien to them. And she did _not_ have time.

“Spike,” she demanded, “Where’s Angel? Which way did they go?”

Spike flashed a nasty smile at Buffy, a half second sooner than he should have. Spinning on her heels, she blocked the heavy iron bar that Angel was swinging at her head, catching it in both hands. The metal slammed into her palms so hard it made the tiny bones in her wrists vibrate, but Buffy held on and immediately began using the bar to push Angel back.

Suddenly, in one smooth motion, Angel released the bar and ducked under it so that Buffy flew forward into him and he was able to catch her around the waist and roll on top of her. Without hesitation, she head butted Angel in the face and threw him backwards into Spike, who had been lolling against the wall of the tunnel with a smirk on his face watching the show.

“Watch it, Mate!” Spike snarled, scuttling backwards. The smirk was gone, but he still seemed content to watch from the sidelines.

Leaping forward, maintaining the initiative, Buffy planted her knees in Angel’s chest, slammed the iron bar down into his throat as hard as she could and held it there with both hands. She couldn’t literally choke him to death, but she got a satisfying sense that it hurt like hell.

“Where’s Ira Rosenberg?” Buffy demanded.

Angel gritted his teeth, planted his hands on either side of Buffy’s and pushed upward until he could speak again. “Spike,” he snarled, “get over here and help me.”

Spike shrugged, vamped out and used his hands to push off from the wall and take a flying leap at the middle of Buffy’s back. Forewarned as she was, Buffy rocked forward into a hand stand on the iron bar that she still held to Angel’s throat. As she did so, she brought her feet up to catch Spike square on the chin in mid air. He crumpled in a heap onto Angel’s legs, getting several more kicks to the face for his trouble.

Buffy reached the top of her arc. Jerking hard on the iron bar, she pulled it against Angel’s chin, hard enough to break his jaw. Releasing her grip on the bar, she let her continued momentum carry her over into a complete summersault, landing squarely on her feet about two yards away from the tangled pile of vampire flesh that was Spike and Angel. Angel scrambled to his feet and kicked Spike several yards down the tunnel as Buffy pulled a stake from her sleeve and prepared to renew the attack.

“Fine!” Spike cried as he skittered off into the depths of the sewers, “Do your own fighting then!”

Angel looked murderously at Buffy, cradling his broken jaw in his left hand and brandishing the metal bar in his right. He stood his ground, but did not advance, definitely on the ropes, but still dangerous.

Buffy considered her options. She could probably stake Angel right now. She might never get a better chance. But in doing so, she would be choosing never to learn what had become of Willow’s father. She felt she had no right to make that choice.

Feigning a direct attack to the heart, Buffy turned at the last minute and drove her stake deep into the muscle of Angel’s right arm, just above the elbow. The swift, hard, from-the-shoulder downward swing that he had been aiming at Buffy’s head more than doubled the effective force behind her stroke, driving the wood through muscles and tendons, crunching and splintering it against bones that crunched and splintered in response.

Angel screamed like a scalded cat and involuntarily dropped the bar. It banged into Buffy’s back fairly hard (but not hard enough to slow her down) as it bounced off into the darkness.

Continuing her forward lunge without losing much momentum, Buffy bulldozed Angel off his feet. Still holding the stump of her stake in her left hand, she used it to pin Angel’s right arm to the ground, twisting it in his mangled flesh. With her right she blocked his left handed snatch for her hair.

“Where is Ira Rosenberg?” she demanded once again.

For a moment, Angel seemed to be genuinely trying to speak. Then, he shuttered with pain and stopped trying. The swelling in his jaw was only getting worse as the coloring of his bruises deepened from red to purple.

Knowing Buffy as he did, he let his face slip into human form, allowing himself to look more pitiful and less threatening. He let his arms and legs go limp, giving every appearance of surrender to her mercy.

Knowing Angel as she did, Buffy knew this was a tactic to soften her resolve and put her off her guard. Unfortunately, despite that knowledge, it was still working. Buffy was a fighter, not a victimizer. She found it hard to keep up a sustained assault against a limp, compliant enemy.

Digging her knees into Angel’s ribcage, Buffy released her grip on his broken and bleeding right arm. She pulled his good left arm against his chest and held it there, at a loss as to what to do next. How the heck do you interrogate someone who can’t speak?

If he couldn’t tell her what she needed to know, staking seemed to be the next logical step, but she had left her spare stake in her purse in the ladies restroom. Besides, the longer he lay still and apparently helpless, the harder it was for Buffy to work up the fire necessary for mortal violence.

Of course, Buffy tried to remind herself, Angel was not a mortal. He was a vampire. On any given night of the week, the Slayer could dispatch a random vampire without losing her train of thought about her next shopping trip. She could and did laugh and joke as they died.

But with Angel, it was different. She didn’t love the monster that he was, but she still loved the man, or semi-man, that he had been. The sight of his battered flesh lying helpless beneath her was anything but funny. Despite the horror of all he had done, she still found it hard to strike a killing blow.

“Buh—uhn” Angel tried to speak but managed little more than a grunt of pain.

“Is Dr. Rosenberg alive?” Buffy asked, more gently than she wanted to. Angel nodded painfully. “Is he nearby?” Angel hesitated. Buffy kneed him hard in both sides. “Is he nearby?” she demanded more sharply. Angel nodded. “Back towards the Mall access?” Buffy guessed. Angel shook his head feebly, then cocked it in the direction that they had been travelling, deeper into the sewers.

Rage welled up in Buffy once again. “You gave him to Drusilla!” She accused. Angel couldn’t smile, but his eyes twinkled.

“Not _just_ Drusilla,” said an unfamiliar voice from the tunnel ahead. A chorus of laughter followed as no less than a half dozen vampires stepped from the shadows. Spike had gone for help after all.

While his minions advanced rapidly, Angel freed his good left arm and made a grab for Buffy’s throat. As she sprung to her feet, still astride Angel’s chest, he rolled to the right, trying to knock her off balance. Instead, he rolled onto his stricken arm, sending pain shooting through his body.

As Angel lay writhing on the floor of the tunnel, Buffy sprang backward, putting him between her and the advancing gang of vamps. For the next few seconds, they would either have to stop and help Angel or stagger over him one or two at a time.

Which would have been a great set up if only Buffy had a stake. Or a sword she amended, seeing a glint of metal in the hand of a large vamp, who was indeed advancing over the body of his fallen master while others stopped to help him to his feet.

Predictably, the sword wielder lunged straight for Buffy’s mid section. Leaping above his stroke, Buffy kicked him in the face and brought both feet down on his arm. Grazing her shoulder on the curved ceiling of the sewer tunnel, Buffy collapsed in a heap on top of her attacker, but the sword was thrown free as she had planned. It landed perhaps three feet from the spot where Angel had once lain and from which three vampires were now gathering themselves for an advance while the other two helped Angel down the tunnel.

Buffy, lunged for the sword despite the risks, just as her first attacker recovered himself enough to grab hold of her right leg and bite down. Kicking him hard with her left, Buffy forced his fangs from her flesh, ripping great gashes down the side of her calf. She fell on her chest against the floor of the tunnel hard enough to knock the wind out of her, but hers was the first hand to close on the hilt of the sword, which she brought up directly into the face of her nearest competitor.

The young, female vampire staggered back, bleeding and screaming. The two who had been advancing behind her pulled up short to keep from stumbling over her. The vampire behind Buffy made another desperate grab for her legs, to keep her on the ground, but she swung her upper body in a smooth arc, severing his clinging hands above the wrists. Kicking the severed hands aside, she sprang to her feet and decapitated her cringing foe.

Surrounded by a haze of vampire dust, the Slayer rounded on the companions of her slain enemy, brandishing the fatal sword. Slowly, she let a wicked smile spread across her lips. The remaining vampires turned and fled.

Buffy sagged. The smile melted from her face, leaving it a mask of pain and anguish. Leaning on her sword for support, she took off Willow’s sweater and tied it as tight as she could round her bleeding leg. Her makeshift bandage was infused with sewer slime, but there was no other way to control the bleeding.

Despite her leg wound and the slippery walking surface, Buffy made her way back towards the theater at a fairly good clip. She was in no shape to hang around and see if the vamps would come back with reinforcements.

She moved quickly and quietly, uttering an unbroken string of curses only in her mind. Willow’s father was undoubtedly dead or dying. It was almost too much to hope that Angel and company would let him stay dead.

And yet, once again, Buffy had had the murdering demon within her grasp and failed to summon the will to bring an end to him. Once again, she had been weak. She had been stupid. She had been sentimental. She had let Angel get away. 


	3. Will the Real Rupert Giles Please Stand Up!

Alarm bells startled Giles from sleep. He rolled over and hit the floor, by way of the coffee table. It hurt, but that wasn’t the main reason his head was pounding. For a moment he struggled to understand why he was lying there. Then, like a nightmare, the events of the past couple of days came rushing back. Unfortunately, he had not drunk enough or been hit on the head hard enough to leave any significant gaps in his memory, though time was a bit of a blur.

When the phone refused to stop ringing, he had a strong impulse to hurl it across the room. He picked it up instead. “Hello?” he murmured testily. This had better be important.

“Giles,” Buffy cried, “You have to come get me! I’m in big trouble.”

“Where are you?” he asked, suddenly alert.

“The outside payphone at the gas station behind the mall,” Buffy responded hurriedly. “I can’t wait long. I’m wounded and the police are looking for me.”

“I’ll be right there,” Giles assured her, already grabbing his keys from the hook by the door. His dashboard clock told him it was just after seven when he pulled up behind the station. It felt like midnight at least. Buffy Emerged from the shadow of the small, squat building that held the station’s restrooms, limped to the passenger door and got in.

“Thank God,” she gasped as Giles quickly pulled the Citron back onto the street.

“What happened?” Giles asked, his voice full of concern.

“Angel,” said Buffy bitterly. “He snatched Willow's dad from the mall.”

“Good lord!” Giles gasped.

“Right through the ceiling,” Buffy continued. “Then down through the duct work. I caught up with them in the sewer, but there were too many of them. I only managed to dust the one that bit my leg. I broke Angel’s jaw though, I’m pretty sure. And his arm.”

“Well, A for effort,” said Giles with grim amusement, “But, why are the police after you? And where is Willow?”

“The cops got her,” Buffy said matter-of-factly, skipping ahead to the second question.

“Good heavens!” Giles exclaimed. “For what, exactly?” He demanded.

“Apparently” Buffy explained, “they think we’re part of some kind of drug gang, and that we had Dr. Rosenberg kidnapped when he caught us stealing his prescription pad.”

“Well, of course!” Giles laughed sardonically, instantly realizing what had happened.

“We were forging a scrip in the ladies room when we heard the screaming,” Buffy confirmed. “I heard the cops talking about us when I came back up through the manhole on Birchwood. They found the pad in the bathroom along with our purses, and IDs... and weapons.”

“This all my fault,” Giles fretted.

“All _our_ fault,” Buffy corrected him. “So what do we do about it?”

Giles sighed and took one hand off the wheel to rub his temples, which he found to be somewhat less relaxing when done without closing one’s eyes. “I need to think,” he said.

“We could go to your apartment,” Buffy suggested.

“Oh, no,” Giles countered earnestly, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

“I promise to behave myself,” said Buffy dryly.

Giles made a nervous sound between a cough and a laugh. “If the police are looking for you,” he clarified, “You probably shouldn’t be hanging around an active crime scene.”

Buffy had to admit he had a point. “Well we can’t go to my house,” She pointed out, more for something to say than because there was any thought of going there, “or Willow’s, so where does that leave? School?” Giles was honestly choking now, so much so that Buffy had to slap him on the back. For an instant she had a horrifying future flash of the two of them trapped in a long dead marriage that would eventually involve her feeding him strained peas and wiping the spittle from his chin with the edge of his bib while their deadbeat college dropout son stayed holed-up in the garage all day summoning demons and listening to death metal.

“Lord no,” he gasped as soon as he could draw breath, “If they found us there together...”

Buffy sighed. “Vegas it is then,” she said with a wan smile.

“Of course,” Giles laughed along with her. “We can open that office supply warehouse you’ve always dreamed about.” Buffy felt a sudden pang of heartache remembering the morning she had told Giles about that silly dream and another, much darker one. It was hard to believe that less than six weeks ago Angel’s death had been her greatest fear. If only that nightmare had come true in its entirety. At least then Angel would have died with his soul intact.

They were nearing the point at which they would have to turn off Sunnydale’s main thoroughfare to go anywhere but out of town. Giles made a decision. “All we really need is light and water,” he said aloud. “I have my first aid kit in the trunk. There’re a dozen motels out on the highway just the other side of Fondren. They know you don’t drive, so if we’re lucky, there might not be road blocks.” For once, they _were_ lucky.

It was not yet eight o’clock when Giles pulled up to the Pacific Coast Motor Lodge. Buffy waited in the car while he went inside to pay and get the keys. He silently handed them over without looking at her as he got back behind the wheel to pull the car around. Buffy blushed unseen in the merciful darkness. It was such a caricature of a seedy motel tryst that, if not for recent events, she would have been amused by it, maybe even a little grossed out, to be honest. But for better or for worse, one thing had changed forever in Buffy’s mind. Though she might feel guilt and shame at the thought of Giles caressing her body, she was not repulsed by it. She _knew_ better. A week ago, she had thought of him almost as a third parent, though one who was noting like her mother or her father. She didn't think of him that way anymore.

“Here we are, 247,” Giles said, pulling into the space so marked. Buffy groaned, looking at the key to confirm that they were on the second floor. “There weren't any rooms downstairs,” he apologized. “Wait there,” he added, “I’ll help you.” For the sake of pride, she managed to get her door open and get out while he was getting the first aid kit from the trunk. But her leg felt even weaker, and even more hot and swollen, than it had less than an hour earlier in Sunnydale. Pride notwithstanding, she leaned against the car and waited to be helped up the stairs.

Holding the kit in his left hand, Giles wrapped the same arm around Buffy’s waist, instructing her to put her right arm over his shoulders. That left them each with a steady leg on the outside and a free hand on the rails as they made their way up the narrow staircase that clung to the side of the motel. Pride now totally outweighed by gratitude, Buffy leaned into Giles, allowing him to bear the bulk of her weight, though she knew the climb was difficult for him too. He was breathing even harder than she was, and his heart was hammering.

In the light from the bare bulb beside the motel room door, Giles looked like he’d been through hell, more or less literally. Though he had made an effort at washing his face and hands, there was still ash in his hair and a sooty streak behind one ear. His rumpled tweed pants and filthy oxford shirt, unbuttoned over a relatively less filthy T-shirt, stank of smoke, gasoline and sweat. There was a coarse layer of stubble over his cheeks and chin. “You look terrible,” she heard herself saying, too tired to think of a more tactful way to voice her concern.

Giles smiled with good-natured amusement. “Look who’s talking,” he pointed out.

“You should see the other guy,” Buffy replied dutifully. There was something a little bit cruel about the smile that stole over Giles features, though not unwarrantedly so.

The light was better on the inside. Giles helped Buffy to a seat on the edge of one of the two double beds and knelt to unwrapped the sweater knotted around her right leg. It was caked with blood and sewage. Her leg was a mass of scabbing, swelling and bruising that looked two days old. If her wounds had been so old, they'd already be badly infected. Her skin was streaked with dried sewer sludge. There was bound to be more festering beneath her scabs. They needed to be cleaned, scraped off, cleaned again, treated with an anti-bacterial agent, and bandaged up.

“Right then,” he said to himself as much as to Buffy, “I think we’d better start in the shower.” Buffy gave him a pointed, questioning look, or at least he imagined that she did. Flustered and annoyed with himself for being so, he added, “by which I mean you, of course... erm... solo as it were.”

“Thank you for clearing that up,” said Buffy sarcastically.

“Yes, right, well, do you think you can stay on your feet in the shower?” He asked briskly. He resisted the urge to explain that he _hadn’t_ been thinking anything inappropriate but had only been concerned that she might think that he was.

“I’ll manage,” Buffy replied dryly. She hobbled to the bathroom and closed the door.

Giles sat down on the end of the bed and gave his temples a good, closed-eyed rubbing at last. He wasn’t worried about Buffy’s injuries. With a little first aid and a lot of Slayer power, she’d be alright in a day or two. He would have liked to have been more worried about Dr. Rosenberg, but his fate was all but certain. What worried Giles most was Buffy’s and Willow’s trouble with the police. If they were suspects in Dr. Rosenberg’s death, Buffy couldn't show her face in Sunnydale. But if they were only being viewed as witnesses, hiding would create unwarranted suspicion. And then there was the business with the prescription pad, also a felony.

“Rupert, you idiot,” he murmured to himself, “You’ve really done it now!” Willow had a first rate mind and she deserved a first rate future. Realizing that she might loose significant educational and profession opportunities on his account made Giles ill with regret. He had always known, on some level, that by allowing Buffy’s friends to become involved in her work, he was putting them in danger physically. He hadn’t thought that he was putting them in any _moral_ danger. Now he was unsure how he had ever justified even that.

But this was no time to wallow in regret. He needed to know what Willow had told the police. She and Buffy were entirely too honest to be good liars. Willow’s rapid, high pitched squeaking would leave anyone suspicious. Buffy would need to learn and practice exactly what the story was in order to avoid adlibbing ridiculous and contradictory details. Of course, Giles didn’t even know if Willow was still being held by the police. But he knew exactly whom to ask.

“Hello!” Xander half shouted, picking up in the middle of the first ring.

“Thank God your home,” said Giles, truly relieved to hear the boy's voice.

“Giles, where are you?” Xander demanded, “I’ve been trying to call you for an hour. Buffy’s missing.”

“Xander—” Giles tried to interrupt.

“Willow’s been _arrested_ ,” he went on incredulously. “They actually found her dad dead in a ditch, and that was literally!”

“I know—” Giles tried again.

“Everyone’s freaking out!” Xander continued, his voice rising in pitch and volume. “Buffy’s mom, my mom, Willow’s mom. _Oz_ is freaking out! This is new and it is not good!”

“Xander!” Giles shouted. “Calm down! Buffy is with me. We’re... in a safe place. Is Willow still being held by the police?”

“Yeah,” said Xander, seeming a little more steady, “It’s just, it’s too much. You have to help sort this out. I mean Willow is...Willow.”

“Xander,” Giles said in his most steadying, teacherly voice, “of what, specifically, are they accusing the girls. They don’t suspect them of committing the actual murder?”

“I don’t know,” Xander admitted. “They haven’t said so. It’s more like they think they’re mixed up with whoever did it, that it’s because of them somehow... which I’m guessing is pretty much the case.”

“Yes,” Giles confirmed grimly, “It was Angel and his gang.”

“Please,” said Xander earnestly, “tell me that demonic scumbag is a pile of dust!”

“I wish I could,” Giles replied sincerely. “Buffy... injured him, but he got away. She’s a bit hurt herself, nothing serious.”

“Oh man!” said Xander, “Why couldn’t she have killed him when she had that rocket launcher?”

Giles smiled ruefully, wanting to say that he’d asked himself that very question, many times. Instead he said, “Was there any mention of...erm of drugs of any kind?”

“Yeah,” said Xander, “now that you mention it, but it didn’t make sense. Something about a prescription pad... I didn’t really understand what.”

“Were you able to glean any sense of what Willow herself has told the police?” Giles probed, trying not to sound as relieved as he felt by Xander's ignorance.

“Some,” Xander acknowledged, “She told them she had no idea who took her dad or why, and that Buffy chased them, and for all she knows Buffy could be dead.”

“Good lord!” Giles breathed. “Joyce must be going mad!”

“And then some,” Xander confirmed. “She’s started a mass mom-calling chain reaction. The whole town’s out looking for Buffy, maybe the whole county.” Giles cursed with quiet conviction. He needed to set Joyce’s fears to rest before she organized a state wide manhunt.

“Xander,” he said firmly, “listen carefully. I want you to call Joyce; tell her you’ve heard from Buffy and she’s safe. Don’t mention my name or where we are.”

“I don’t know where you are,” Xander reminded him.

“Good,” Giles replied, “then you won’t be tempted. Tell her Buffy’s afraid to come home because she doesn’t know how much trouble she is in and that she said she’d call again. Try to persuade her to find out what Willow has told the police, especially about the prescription pad.”

There was a pause, then, amazed, “Say! You actually know what the deal is with that, don’t you!”

“Erm...well, yes,” Giles admitted, “I do.”

“So, give,” Xander demanded good-naturedly.

“I fear that would be betraying a confidence,” Giles hedged.

“Yeah?” Xander retorted, ruffled again, “Well I fear my best friend is going to jail and you know something that could help get her out of it, so spill.”

“Well...” Giles hesitated. It really was true that he owed it to Willow to provide any information that would help her, regardless of the cost to himself. It was probably also true that what he knew would not help her but would merely confirm that she was guilty of at least one crime. “She had her father’s prescription pad...” He finally admitted, “Without his knowledge.”

“No way,” Xander replied, “not Willow, she of the dotted Is and crossed Ts.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” Giles confirmed. “It was found by the police apparently.”

“Well, I mean what did they want with it? It had to be pretty important for Willow to steal something from her own dad. It has to be some kind of demon thing, right, like a hell beast made of acne that can only be killed by Acutance or something.”

“Erm, yes, something like that I suppose,” Giles murmured.

“Suppose?” Xander challenged, smelling a rat, “What did Buffy say? Where is Buffy?”

“She... in the shower,” Giles admitted not liking where this conversation was going.

“Where _are_ you guys?” Xander demanded.

“At a motel!” Giles shouted, exasperated. “Hiding from the police until we can figure out whether or not Buffy’s about to be arrested for murder. Now are you going to help us, or shall we spend the rest of the night batting questions back and forth?”

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” Xander insisted doggedly. “I don’t like it.”

“How do you like Willow and Buffy remaining in danger whilst we two chat about our feelings?” Giles replied witheringly, shamelessly playing on the boy's sense of inadequate manliness. He hated himself for it. But it was effective, as he had known that it would be.

“Giles!” Buffy shouted a merciful second after Xander had hung up to go complete his mission, “I’m all clean! Where do you want me?!”

_ Anytime anywhere!  _ The thought snuck up on Giles, ambushing him from the depths of an exhausted brain. “I’ll be in there in a second!” he shouted, frustrated with himself, regretting the appearance that his frustration was directed at her. Then again, he realized, it might be better if she thought so. If they had no choice but to spend the night in this room together, something had to be done to restore emotion distance between them, even if it was a distance that she alone felt.

*****

Joyce walked in through the kitchen door and glanced across the room at her answering machine. The red light flashed Zero, but she pressed play anyway. “You have no new message and... no saved messages,” it confirmed. Joyce stood helplessly in the middle of her kitchen, at a loss as to what to do next. She had been everywhere, talked to everyone. There was no sign of Buffy. Mercifully, the phone rang. Joyce dove for it. “Hello?” she cried hopefully.

Joyce heard the feeble knocking, just as Xander blurted into the phone, “Buffy called me, she’s okay... you know, not okay okay, but alive; anyway, she told me to call you!”

“Xander!” Joyce demanded as she walked to the back door and opened it, “Where is she?” She peered out into the night for half a second, thinking she must have imagined the knock. Then a low moaning caused her to look down...

“She wouldn’t tell me,” Xander was saying, “but she said it’s a safe place. She’s worried about what the cops want with her. She’s kind of freaking out what with all the murder and horror and death and everything.”

A man lay on Joyce’s doorstep, beaten so badly that she knew him only by his eyes. “Angel!” she gasped. She was on the point of kneeling down. He looked badly hurt.

“Don’t let him in!” Xander shouted, his voice shrill with panic. “Don’t open the door!”

“He’s hurt,” said Joyce, stunned, confused, overwhelmed with emotional input.

“He killed them!” Xander wailed. “He killed Dr. Rosenberg and Miss Calendar! Buffy told me! Please, please go inside! He’ll kill you!”

At that moment Joyce’s eyes locked with Angel’s. She looked through what should have been the windows of his soul and saw... something else. With a small scream, she jumped back across her threshold, just as he grabbed for her, his unnaturally sharp fingernails scraping her leg. Joyce slammed the door, nearly dropping the phone receiver. Angel howled with rage like a wounded animal, banged on the door a couple of times and loped off into the night.

“Xander,” Joyce gasped, “ _what_ is happening?”

“He killed them,” Xander repeated. “He killed them both. This time Buffy tried to stop him. They fought... I ... I think he took her somewhere, I don’t know, but she escaped, and she called me, and I guess she heard what happened to Willow and now she’s afraid to come home.”

“Oh dear lord,” Joyce gasped, it was too much to absorb. But Buffy was alive. Even though she didn’t have a millisecond to enjoy the sense of relief that this news should have brought, it was something to hold on to, an anchoring in reality. Her little girl was out there somewhere needing her help. “We have to call the police,” she said.

“I don’t know...” Xander said, worried. This was not the result he had been asked to bring about. “Buffy thinks they think she killed him. She’s afraid—”

“No one think's Buffy killed anyone,” Joyce insisted, “They’re looking for her because Willow said she might have been taken hostage, that she might be hurt. And anyway,” she went on, clarifying her thoughts as she spoke, “this man, this 'Angel', he has to be stopped.”

*****

When Buffy’s wounds were cleaned and dressed, Giles put her to bed, still wearing a towel for a night dress. She went quietly, compliantly, like an obedient child. She _thanked_ him. He wanted to weep. She was asleep almost at once, though it was no later than nine o’clock. It was a sign of just what kind of toll the day had taken on her.

Giles wanted very much to shower, to become clean, but without any clean clothes to put on, it seemed pointless. He could have washed his clothes along with Buffy’s, but he couldn’t quite sanction the idea of the two of them sleeping in those two double beds, not three feet apart, each wearing nothing but a towel. Instead, he went to the sink and began to wash only her clothes. He discarded the sweater. It was too far gone to do anything but contaminate the rest.

He had just hung the laundered items on the shower rod when the phone rang. It was the front desk. “Mr. _Rayne_?” the clerk asked, uncertainly.

“Yes,” Giles answered without hesitation.

“There are some—There’s um a message for you... that is a package, at the front desk.”

“Of course,” he answered smoothly, lifting the edge of a curtain to see a Del Bacco County Sheriff’s cruiser parked outside. “I’ll get dressed and come right down.” Hanging up, he ran to Buffy and shook her. “We’ve got to get out of here!” he said quietly, urgently.

“The factory’s on fire,” Buffy agreed, still more asleep than awake. Then sitting up, alert, she asked “Giles, what is it?”

“The police,” he informed her. “County Sheriffs, actually.”

“How did they know we were here?” Buffy asked.

“They must have somehow traced the phone call I made. I called Xander, while you were in the shower, to try to get some information about Willow—”

Buffy threw up her hands in exasperation. “That’s it then,” she declared, “Star 69.”

“Star... what?” Giles asked.

“They pushed a code on Xander’s phone and got the front desk.” She explained impatiently. Sometimes she could swear Giles actually cultivated his hopelessness with technology. “So let’s think; what do we do?” she asked, trying to stay focused. She started to get up, then asked, “Where are my clothes?”

“I just washed them,” Giles admitted apologetically. “They’re sopping wet.” He risked another peak through the curtains, “They’re probably watching the landing,” he surmised, “I’d suggest going out the bathroom window and over the roof, but...”

“My leg’s hurt,” Buffy agreed, “And besides, I am _not_ doing that in a towel.”

“We don’t have long,” he informed her. “The front desk clerk called pretending to have a package for me, well, Ethan, actually. They’re expecting me, or him, to come right down.”

“Wait, what?” said Buffy.

Giles smiled, “I took the liberty of registering under the name Ethan Rayne.”

“Okay,” said Buffy, “I can work with that. Can _you_ get down through the bathroom window and over the roof?” Considering this for a moment, he nodded. “Then that's the plan,” she told him. “Take the car, but ditch it somewhere. When you get home, report it stolen. You didn’t see who took it, but I did, it was Ethan Rayne, when he kidnapped me.”

“No,” Giles amended, “It was Angel. He must have found Ethan’s credit card in the glove box. That way we don’t have to explain—”

“—how Angel would have gotten mixed up with Ethan. Got it,” said Buffy. She didn’t have time to worry about explaining what Ethan’s credit card was doing in Giles’ glove box. “Giles go!” She commanded. With a brief look of deep regret, he did.

Buffy sat in the dark listening for the sound of Giles falling to his possible death and probably injury. Five minutes passed. It didn’t come. Instead she heard the sound of a car starting, somewhere on the other side of the motel. A minute later, someone knocked forcefully on the door and shouted, “Police!”

Buffy had just enough time to lie back so that she could start up when the door was kicked in. “Thank God!” she cried, glad for the dimness of the room, which made it easier to fake a sense of relief and wellbeing.

“Buffy Summers?” The man asked matter-of-factly, flipping on the light with one hand while holding his gun at a polite downward angel with the other. Buffy nodded. “Deputy Paulson,” the officer identified himself formally, “Del Bacco County Sherriff’s Office. At this time, I’m taking you into protective custody as a material witness in the murders of Ira Rosenberg and Jennifer Calendar.”

“What?” Buffy objected, “I want to call my mom. Can't she please just take me home.”

“Not at this time,” said Paulson woodenly.

“Well can't I at least call and let her know I’m alive?” Buffy asked plaintively.

Paulson gave her a strange, appraising look, then said, “Who do you think called us?”

*****

Monday morning found Rupert Giles at his desk in the Sunnydale High School library. Three miles away, at the Pleasant Hill Cemetery, there was a funeral in progress. He had been asked by the family not to attend. “There are reasons,” Jenny’s aunt had explained, “why the Councilmen and the Kalderash do not work together. Many of your enemies are also our enemies, but your ways are not our ways, your fight is not our fight, and your people are not our people.” Giles couldn’t really say he disagreed. Yet, somehow Jenny had _belonged_ to both worlds. Both had had a hand in killing her. Both sincerely mourned her.

Confused though he was about his feelings for Buffy, he felt no uncertainty about Jenney. She had been the one. He was in love with her and always would be. But she would always be gone. And that still, small voice that told him _Buffy_ was ‘the one’ also? Could the sun rise and set at the same time? It had to be some bizarre form of transference. Or a convenient self-justification for the crimes of lust. It would fade away. It would dwindle in perspective. If not, God help him. A Watcher in love with his Slayer? There was nothing poetic about that. It was worse than maudlin. It was... insoluble.

Giles stared blankly at the desk in front of him, at the life in front of him, each filled with things to be done, neither showing him what to do. He resisted the urge to call Buffy’s home again. He had left two messages on Sunday, which were not returned. That was already at least one too many for a concerned faculty member, though perhaps his relationship with Jenny and his mentorship of Buffy were enough to explain them. One more would be suspicious by any standard. The last Xander had heard, Sunday morning, Buffy and Willow had still been detained, ostensibly only for questioning. Giles was no expert in American law, but that struck him as unusual. Unless the police were trying to extract a confession to murder from the two girls.

Giles racked his brains, trying once again to think of something he could say or do that would make their situation better and not worse. At some point, if they were in fact charged with murder on a theory that implicated them in the illegal sale of prescription drugs, his testimony as to what they were really doing with that prescription pad could be essential. In the meantime, if they were being charged with illegally forging a prescription, such a revelation would do nothing but confirm their guilt as well as his own. But, he struggled with the fundamental injustice of Buffy, and particularly Willow, facing charges in this whole sordid affair while he did not.

Of course, it had been a rather close escape on his part. Sturdy and serviceable though it was, his Citron was certainly not the ideal vehicle for a high speed chase, and it was sure to have been watched. Instead, he had hot wired a sporty little red number parked at the far end of the building. With silent apologies to his victim, he had put a mile between himself and the motel at a normal rate of speed, then rocketed down the two lane blacktop to Sunnydale. Praying that it was fully insured, he’d parked the stolen car in the alley behind Willy’s Bar, wiped his prints off the doors and steering column, and sprinted home through the mean back streets of Sunnydale.

As yet, his own car had not been returned to him. It had been impounded for evidence, having supposedly been involved in a kidnapping and at least one murder. Upon reflection, he realized, it would have been better if he had advised Buffy to turn herself in at once. Then at least they would be factually guilty of a few less crimes, and the story they had to sell to the police would have been somewhat less complicated. And of course, he might not have learned how very capable he was of running out on Buffy to save himself.

“So you _are_ here,” said an all too familiar voice. Giles looked up into the mean little face of his inferior superior, Principal Snyder. As usual, Snyder was angered by his own incomprehension of events. “Why weren’t you at the funeral?”

“I... thought it best,” he said levelly, “under the circumstances.”

“Yes,” Snyder said nastily, “the circumstances.” Giles gazed back at him, keeping his features impassive with great effort. “Mr. Giles,” the principal went on in his usual wary, pedantic tone, “I work very hard to maintain order in this school. Discipline. I expect every member of this faculty to set an example.”

“Well, then,” Giles retorted scornfully, “in future I shall try _not_ to find any of my fellow teachers murdered in my bed. Will that be all?”

“Not even close,” Snyder assured him.

“Alright,” said Giles, nasty-sweet, “what _else_ can I help you with this morning?”

“Buffy Summers,” Snyder snarled, “I want her out of my school. I want her out of my town.”

“Humph,” Giles sniffed, “why are you telling me this?”

“Everyone knows,” Snyder informed him, “that this whole kidnapping story is a smoke screen. That juvenile delinquent and her... partner in crime killed one of my teachers. I take that very personally.”

“I assure you,” Giles began with controlled heat, “Buffy Summers would never—”

“Don’t be a fool,” Snyder cut in. “She’s a _teenager_. Believe me, they’re capable of anything.”

“What, exactly, is the point of this conversation?” Giles demanded, exasperated.

“The point,” Snyder informed him, “is that Miss Summers should be expelled prior to being imprisoned as she so richly deserves. Unfortunately, those cowards on the school board insist on... proof.”

“Again, I ask,” said Giles, losing patience by the second, “why are you telling _me_ this?”

“Search your memory,” Snyder urged him in a slow, snaky voice. “I think you’ll find that you _do_ remember seeing your car stolen after all. I think you’ll find that Miss Summers was only too happy to be going along for the ride.”

This was too much to be endured. Slowly, Rupert drew himself up to his full height. “Let me tell you, Mr. Snyder,” he said with quiet, dignified rage, stepping around his desk to stand toe to toe and chest to eye with his puny adversary, “what I think you will find if you search _your_ memory. You will find that time and again Buffy Summers has been personally responsible for saving lives and... quelling ‘disorder’ at this school. Her efforts alone put a stop to the Parent/Teacher Night Massacre to name a single indisputable example. Each and every person in this school and in this town owes that young woman a debt that can never be repaid, and I refuse to take any part in your malignant efforts to destroy her!”

Snyder stared up at him wide-eyed, literally speechless. This was a side of the mild-mannered librarian he had never seen before. “Furthermore,” Giles continued, boiling now, “If I hear one word from any source of this little fantasy you have concocted about Ms. Summers’... involvement in these crimes, I will be forced to report this conversation to the highest authorities, and I _don’t_ mean the Del Bacco County School Board!”

“This isn’t over,” Snyder growled, when he had recovered himself enough to speak. Mr. Giles stared at him in steely, resolute silence. Grunting with inarticulate rage, the smaller man turned on his heels and stormed out of the library.

When his anger had cooled a little Giles felt a deep sense of relief. If the School Board were refusing to consider discipline against Buffy on the grounds that they lacked proof of sufficient misconduct, it hardly seemed likely that the Prosecuting Attorney could be on the verge of charging her with murder. Snyder had made no mention of seeking discipline against Willow, so it was a fair bet she too had been cleared of murder charges at least. And if Snyder thought that there was even the remotest chance that he could enlist Giles against Buffy, then the investigation had produced absolutely no indication of an intimate involvement between them.

All things considered, Rupert was starting to feel guardedly optimistic about avoiding the worst consequences of his lapse in self control (for surely, he reminded himself, that was all it had really been). Reaching a hand into his jacket pocket, reassuring himself that the tiny packet was still there. Surely Buffy would be released today. She might even come to school. If not, he was sure he could get the pills to her tonight, even if he had to risk going to her home.

As it had been explained to him by his old pharmacologist friend, David Pummil, he had until around midnight to get Buffy her first dose, though sooner would of course be better. It had been so simple that he'd had to fight the urge to beat himself up for not going to David first. Of course, his instinct was always to avoid acquaintances from that period in his life. No Watcher wants to be reminded of one of his fallen Slayers. Especially a Slayer who has taken her own life. Nevertheless, he had what was needed now. Soon, they would both be able to put this whole unseemly incident behind them and get on with their sacred duties. And he could forget his daft, ridiculous notion that a little irresponsible sex was somehow a symptom of true love.

*****

When Snyder got back to his office, he was still shaking. Who did that pompous English prima donna think he was? How dare he suggest that Richard C. Snyder needed some teenaged outsider like Buffy Summers to help keep order in his school! It confirmed what he’d suspected all along. Whatever that young vigilante had it in her head to do, Rupert Giles was in it up to his perfect hairline. Her randomly murderous attacks on the towns demonic inhabitants, her meddling in school business; it was all at his instigation. Mr. Giles had moved to town not one month before the great St. Buffy. Clearly, like John the Baptist, he had come to prepare the way.

Briefly, Snyder wondered which group of well meaning interlopers they took their orders from. Gypsies, covens, the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church, secret societies of every stripe all had their agents at Sunnydale High, most of them hired by that idiot Fluty, who had not been eaten soon enough. Each group had a slightly different, but related notion of ‘fighting evil’ here at the Mouth of Hell. But those who knew and loved Sunnydale, who understood it as Snyder did, knew that the evil here could not be fought, could not be defeated. It had to be... accommodated... balanced... controlled.

Snyder understood. This was his town, his home. It was clear that in the years he’d been away perusing his educational and professional goals, preparing for his current position, certain balls had been dropped. The powerful men of the town, those who made up the School Board, the City Council, the Chamber of Commerce, had been more focused on selfish competition than on keeping the worlds in balance. They had let important things slide, including the all important leadership position at Sunnydale High.

The school was a key component of the delicate system that kept order in the town. It placed the towns youth, themselves natural agents of chaos, where they could be used to absorb the chaotic energy that welled up from the Hellmouth. It acted as a sort of damper, concentrating the madness of Hell in one place where it could be controlled. Now that Snyder was back in town, he was determined to make sure it functioned as intended, to make sure the proverbial trains ran on time, and no one was going to stand in his way, least of all Rupert Giles.

***** 

By midmorning, Giles had run out of useful things to do in his office. He was sitting at the front reading table, trying to distract himself by cross referencing demons described in Chinese and Babylonian texts to see which might be one and the same. Suddenly, he felt himself to be the object of quiet scrutiny. He looked up into the stony face of Daniel Osborne. Oz’s eyes silently, patiently demanded an explanation. Giles was silent himself for a long moment, but there seemed to be no way around the conversation. The young man before him had a quiet resolve that would not be denied.

“Erm... how are you... this morning?” Giles began awkwardly.

“How am, I?” said Oz in a tone that those who knew him best might recognize as indignant. “I just got through teaching a class in Computer Science? Which is cool because apparently it gets me out of having to go to math class, for some reason? The only thing is, I got asked to do this because my girlfriend wasn’t here to get asked, I guess? Because she’s... in jail? Okay, so here’s the thing. She’s in jail, apparently, for stealing something which I know for a fact she does not need, and which, from what I’ve been told, I kind of didn’t think Buffy needed either. But, see, I don’t know for a fact about Buffy and so, for some reason, I’m kind of thinking maybe you do.”

This was followed by what Giles studiously avoided thinking of as a pregnant pause. “Well...” he finally managed. “I...really don’t know what to tell you.” Oz’s glare intensified, forcing Giles to look down at the book in front of him.

“You know,” said Oz contemplatively, maybe a bit contemptuously, “Willow really looks up to you. She thinks you’re some kind of hero, some great intellectual warrior in the fight against Evil. I don’t know, maybe you are. But from where I’m sitting? You’re using her to fight your own personal battles, putting her in harm’s way to do it. I have a real problem with that.”

“Your right,” Giles admitted, burying his face in his hands briefly then forcing himself to meet Oz’s gaze. “I should never have let any of this happen.”

“You Brits aren’t called the kings of understatement for nothing,” Oz observed.

“You aren’t going to...erm... ‘slug’ me are you?” Rupert asked.

“Probably not,” Oz mused. “I might bite you eventually, depending on how things go.”

“Fair enough, I suppose,” Giles murmured, making an unpleasant expression.

“Fair enough,” Oz repeated, with no expression at all.

 


	4. Blood

“Come on honey, let’s go home,” Joyce was able to say at last. She had been at Buffy’s side almost constantly through one day and two nights of intermittently intense police questionings. There had been some truly unpleasant moments. The State Police polygraph examiner had repeatedly challenged Buffy on her ‘deceptive’ responses to questions about Angel. When she'd 'sarcastically' informed him that Angel was a 240 year-old vampire who had killed literally thousands of people, he'd been exasperated. When this response registered as true, he’d resigned in frustration, saying that Buffy was too unstable to produce a valid test result. Detective Sollers had been livid, insisting that Buffy’s deliberately outlandish response hadn’t been _meant_ to fool anyone. Joyce had been forced to admit to herself that Buffy wasn’t quite as fully recovered as she had hoped from her psychotic break nearly two years ago.

Still, the worst times had been the two occasions when questioning had been cut off and she'd been forced to ‘go home and try to get some sleep.’ Joyce couldn’t stand to leave Buffy. Whatever she had done, whatever was going on in her head, she needed her mother. And there was so little that Joyce could do other than the simple act of being with her.

Not that being with Buffy during questioning was easy in any sense. Buffy was definitely lying about how she had ended up in the Pacific Coast Motor Lodge. She’d told Xander a different story than she had told the police, though his statement had apparently been vague enough to conceal that fact. She’d also told the police that Angel was with her at the motel until well past the time that Joyce had seen him at the house. And she’d made no mention of his injuries. Clearly Angel had been gone long enough to get in another fight, long enough for Buffy to have left the motel if that wasn’t where she wanted to be.

Joyce tried not to parse the implications of that fact too closely. It was bad enough being force to contradict herself on her identification of Angel. It _had_ been dark. And his face _had_ been badly beaten. And there _were_ apparently other men associated with Angel who _might_ have been willing to attack Joyce on his say so. But she didn’t even need to see the contemptuous looks on the detectives’ faces to know that they must consider her both a fool and a liar.

Still, the police had finally decided that they had learned everything they could from Buffy and Willow about the murders and that neither girl was responsible for them in the strictest legal sense. With great relief, Joyce put her arm around Buffy’s shoulders and began to lead her from the station at last. They were just stepping into the parking lot when two uniformed Sunnydale Police officers emerged from the station and came up briskly behind them.

“Buffy Summers?” they asked, as if there could be any doubt.

Both Summers women turned to face them exhausted, exasperated and more than a little apprehensive. “What now?” Joyce demanded.

“We have a warrant,” one officer explained, “to take her into juvenile custody.”

“What?” Buffy sputtered. “I already told you I didn’t—”

“On what grounds?” Joyce demanded loudly, silencing her daughter with a gesture. The second officer began to read out a long list of charges that included everything from forgery and theft by deception to attempted prescription drug fraud. Nothing about murder. Everything about the prescription pad. Buffy that she was under arrest, they were crisply informed. She would have to be taken to the Juvenile Detention Center in Fondren for processing.

*****

Sheila hung back in the doorway of the police station, not wanting to involve herself in the situation of the Summers girl’s arrest, not wanting to exchange words with that mother of hers again. Mrs. Summers’ staunch defense of her daughter’s transparent stalling of the investigation was more than the surviving Dr. Rosenberg could take. Her own daughter’s insistence on backing up the girl’s ridiculous version of event was killing her.

What could you say to a child whose misplaced loyalties were so strong that they could not be shaken, even by her own father’s death? Sheila could say nothing to her daughter, could hardly stand to look at her. She had sent her lawyer on ahead to Fondren to deal with the details of Willow’s release, intending to go see Rabi Mike about the arrangements for her husband’s burial. Now these Summers women were keeping her even from that, standing in the parking lot in front of God and everyone arguing with the police like the Harpies that they were.

When, at last they were gone, Sheila hurried to her silver Lexus, laid her head against the steering wheel and closed her eyes. She had to pull herself together. This was no time to start crying. Of course, she would have told anyone else under the same circumstances that crying was healthy, cathartic. But Sheila did not have time to hurt right now, let alone to heal. She had to be strong if she was going to repair what was left of her family.

*****

“I’m telling you,” Snyder insisted combatively, holding the phone receiver in a clenched fist, “that girl is directly responsible for these murders. I can feel it in my gut.”

“And I’m telling you, for the tenth time,” Sheriff Ron Wilkins countered, “Your gut isn’t going to convince the Prosecutor, R.C. He’s a Fondren man. They don’t know the score over here. They need... proof.”

“So find some,” Snyder insisted, “Make some!”

“It’s not that simple,” his cousin tried to explain. “We’re holding up the processing for her and the Rosenberg girl, dragging it out as long as we can... but every single witness who was at that theater agrees that the victim was snatched through the ceiling while both girls were standing in plain view ten feet away. Anyone who saw anything says the Summers girl looked like she was rushing in to help him, just like she told the police. Even the janitor she supposedly took hostage says he’s convinced she did what she did to _prevent_ bloodshed. If we don’t find someone, somewhere to say they saw something different, by tomorrow morning at the very latest, we’re going to have to let them both go.”

“What about a bail hearing?” Snyder asked hopefully. “I don’t think Joyce Summers could come up with much more than a couple of thousand dollars, short of selling her business, and I get the feeling Sheila Rosenberg would pay _not_ to have her daughter home.”

“It’d never work,” the Sheriff, insisted, exasperated. “They’re both juveniles. Neither of them has much of a prior record, that stuck anyway, and the worst charge they’re facing now is a C Felony. Judge Fondren will ROR the both of them, and that’s that.”

“But,” Snyder objected, “the Summers girl is an outsider. She has no roots in the community.”

“Maybe,” Cousin Ron reminded him, “But the Rosenberg girl has roots that’d make a vampire cringe, and we both know it. Maybe it’s not the best idea in the world to make an enemy of her... or her friend.”

“Humph,” Snyder scoffed. “I’m not afraid of her or her ‘roots.’” And he wasn’t. No one had deeper roots in Sunnydale than Richard C. Snyder, not even the Mayor himself. Snyder’s mother was a Wilkins, granddaughter of the Founder and first cousin of the current mayor. Her mother had been a Gleaves, and the granddaughter of Josephus Du Lac, one of few known _legitimate_ descendants through his _legal_ , _Christian_ wife. Some of his ancestors on his father’s side went back even deeper into the history, even prehistory, of Del Bacco County. His Snyder great-grandparents had moved to town ninety-five years earlier, at the personal invitation of the Founder, though during the tumultuous early period of Sunnydale history they had been publicly accounted a part of the Gleaves faction. Their son Samuel Snyder, his grandfather, had shocked the whole community by taking as his wife Alesandra DeLaCruz, the daughter of the last powerful Mexican landowner remaining in the county.

The DeLaCruz family had been among the earliest white settlers in California, but by Alasandra’s time they were said to be so intermarried with the native population that only their wealth prevented them from being officially classed as Indians. Some in the community even hinted that there were things in the DeLaCruz bloodline far wilder than Mexicans or Indians. Regardless, from Alasandra’s point of view, this was a politically savvy marriage. For Samuel, it was a financially lucrative one. She had prevented her family holdings from being bought out, burned out or stolen through baseless litigation as had happened to too many Rancheros in that part of the state. He had brought his modest family wealth beyond their wildest dreams.

The principal himself had been brought up in a modest but dignified fashion by his widowed mother after his father had bankrupted the family and drank himself to death. With the help of his Wilkins relatives, he had been able to pursue a higher education at Del Bacco State Teacher’s College, which two years after his graduation had become U.C. Sunnydale, just in time for him to receive the very first Masters in Education ever awarded there. Now the Mayor had finally entrusted to him the job he’d been ready for since that day. He would not let his town down. He would enforce discipline, order, respect for authority. He would hammer down the nails that stuck up, starting with the little Rosenberg witch and her sword-wielding sidekick.

*****

Willow sat alone on a cold metal bench in a drafty holding cell. The chill in the air was beneath her notice. There was a fist of ice in her chest, squeezing her heart. Her father was dead. Gone forever. She needed him so desperately. Needed him to wrap her in his strong, loving arms, to tell her everything would be okay. But he couldn’t, and it wouldn’t. All that was left was loss and regret. And charges. And lawyers. And Sheila.

Willow had never gotten a lot of love from her mother. It wasn’t as if the brilliant Psychiatric researcher meant to ignore the emotional needs of her only child. She just somehow never got around to meeting them. Her child, like everything else in her life, appeared to be only one more distraction from her never ending work. At least, that had been the case until two nights ago. Now, when Willow looked into her mother’s eyes, their usual haziness was replaced with the bitter clarity heretofore reserved for her ideological and academic enemies.

Now Willow was the enemy. She would have given anything to be a vaguely pleasant distraction again. Well, almost anything, she reminded herself. Because, truth-be-told, Willow knew exactly what she would have to do to get back in her mother’s good graces. All she had to do was accuse Buffy of plotting with Angel to murder her father. Her integrity, her self-respect, and the life of a loyal friend; this was the price of her mother’s love. It was too high.

Integrity. What a strange, slippery thing that was. She was, at this moment, lying and keeping terrible secrets for Buffy and Giles. So why didn’t she feel that they were asking her to compromise her integrity? She didn’t. Not that she wasn’t angry with the both of them for putting her in this position; but at the same time, she felt certain that if she marched up to the nearest deputy and told him every single thing she knew about Buffy and Giles, when the dust settled and the pain dulled, they would still love and respect her. They had pleaded for, not demanded her silence. They knew they had no right to demand it. At the end of the day, her conscience belonged to her, and it was her choice to conceal or reveal the truth, with integrity.

These were Willow’s thoughts when, suddenly, she was brought back to her surroundings by the ponderous sound of the heavy metal door clanging open. There in the doorway, flanked by two guards who could never have held her without her tacit consent, was Buffy. “Oh, Wil!” Buffy cried, rushing to put her arms around her friend, “Willow I’m so sorry!” Willow clung to her friend sobbing, unable to speak.

In short order, they were left alone, though a surveillance camera was clearly visible high in one corner of the room. They sat together on the cold bench for a while, Buffy holding Willow against her, running affectionate hands through her hair, rocking with her a just a little in a motherly, comforting way as both girls continued to weep. “I promise...” Buffy began fiercely, when the sobbing had subsided a little. “Willow, I will not rest until—”

“I know,” Willow broke in hurriedly. “Buffy, I know.” Cutting her eyes towards the camera she added, “You really, really don’t have to say it.”

Buffy nodded, getting the message. A Juvenile Detention cell was no place to proclaim a vow of blood vengeance. In all probability the walls had ears as well as eyes. Squeezing Willows hand she said, “I love you, Wil. That’s the main thing I want you to know.”

“I know,” Willow repeated, squeezing Buffy’s hand in return. “Believe me, I know.”

“So,” Buffy asked, after a few more moments of companionably miserable silence, “how’s your mom holding up?”

Willow stiffened. “Like Gibraltar,” she said bitterly. “She skipped right over denial and went straight for anger. She blames you. She blames me for not blaming you. So far, her idea of bargaining is to command me to sacrifice you to the gods of the criminal justice system.”

“Oh, Wil,” Buffy gasped, shaking her head, “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” said Willow. “I always thought, deep down, maybe my mother didn’t really care about me that much. Now that I know.... In a way it just makes everything easier.”

Buffy wasn’t sure she followed. “How’s that, exactly?” she asked.

“Well,” said Willow, “I’m my own person now. I mean sure, I have to live with my mom until I get out of high school, but I don’t have to... worry any more about... pleasing her, about what she thinks of me. Now I know, and weirdly, I feel like I’ve known all along. I’m never going to please her. She’s never going to be proud of me. Because she doesn’t love me.”

Buffy sat in silence, looking down at her hands in her lap. She didn’t know how to respond to this dark revelation. She felt sad for Willow and her mother. She honestly didn’t know whether Willow was right that there was no love there in the first place or if the love between them had been lost, destroyed by Angel along with Ira Rosenberg’s life. Because of her.

Willow began to cry softly again. Buffy felt tears welling up in her own eyes. “Well,” she said, “you can always stay over at my house, anytime you don’t feel welcome at home.”

Willow sat up a little straighter and looked miserably into her eyes. It was obvious she had something to say. Given the magnitude of the revelations so far, Buffy worried what it could be.

“I... don’t think I’m going to be welcome at your house either,” Willow explained grimly. “The lawyer told me my mom already talked to your mom. They’re going to do their best to make sure we never see each other again.”

Buffy was stunned, not that Sheila would forbid Willow to see her, but that her own mom would agree to enforce this edict without even bothering to tell her about it. Didn’t her mom understand what Willow meant to her? She wondered what other restrictions were in store that her mother hadn’t seen fit to tell her about. “Well,” she said, trying to keep matters in perspective, “at least they can’t keep us from seeing each other at school.”

“Yeah,” said Willow, “actually, they can. Mom’s already started the paperwork to withdraw me from Sunnydale. She’s trying to pull strings with some relatives of ours to get me into Kent Prep in spite of... you know the... conduct requirements.”

“Wow,” said Buffy, “she means business.”

“Yeah,” said Willow, “she does. But it doesn’t matter, I mean, what’s she going to do, lock me in my room at night?” Both girls, thought about this for a moment. “You know,” Willow said, “actually she might.”

*****

After stops at the synagogue and the school, Sheila drove back to her house. She sat out in the front drive for a long while not wanting to go in, dreading what she was about to do. There was no avoiding it. She entered her home and did what she had putting off all weekend. She went into Willow’s room.

At first she assumed that the clutter of books and paper scattered on her daughter’s bedspread was nothing more than the remains of an interrupted bout of homework. But closer inspection revealed most of the texts and periodicals to be her husband’s. By in large, they dealt with human biology and/or reproductive health. So, at least the girls had been telling the truth about their reasons for stealing the prescription pad.

It changed nothing, Sheila decided. Buffy and her boyfriend were still responsible for Ira's murder. Willow was still lying, still covering up for her 'friend.' With an empty heart, Sheila carried the books and journals back to her husband’s study, put them away and locked the door. Mechanically, she walked down stairs, sat at the kitchen table and steeled herself to await her daughter’s return.

In nine more months, Willow would be eighteen years old. Sheila knew she had only these nine months to find and seize any hope that they could ever be a family again. Absently, she ran a hand over the slight convexity of her midlife waistline, remembering nine other months more than seventeen years ago. Now as then, she wondered if nine months would be long enough to do everything she needed to do. Now as then, nine months seemed too long to live in this state of suspense, all her hopes and dreams in the balance. Now as then, she faced the future with fear of the huge, unknowable changes that were coming and wondered if, at the end of these nine months, she would truly feel like a mother.

*****

“My Lord?” came a trembling voice. Angel looked up to see a quavering novice vampire before him, cowering behind his demonic face, in a perpetual state of defensive agitation.

“What?” he said testily, offended by the creatures unworthy existence.

“The Sl-sl-layer,” it stammered. “Sh-sh-she’s b-being re-released in the m-morn-ning. I w-w-was t-told t-to t-te-tell you—”

“Alright,” said Angel impatiently, “you’ve told me. Now, ge-ge-get out of my sight before I bite your sniveling tongue out.” The minion fled in a panicky scramble. Angel watched without his usual relish for witnessing the fear he’d caused. He had other things on his mind.

After nearly a century above ground, living among humans, he was used to a certain level of... creature comforts. The factory had barely met minimum standards, but squatting in a sewer? It was wearing thin. Worse still, he had to deal with the whispering: Angel had been beaten; Angel was laying low, hiding from the Slayer, afraid to leave the tunnels. Something had to be done to restore dignity to his presence, to make a real court for his followers before they began drifting away one by one or worse still, plotting against him to set another in his place, such a Spike, or Drusilla. Angel needed what every king needs, a palace. He also needed to have confrontation, and to be seen to have a confrontation, with the Slayer. Of course, if the timing worked out just right, Dr. Rosenberg should be able to help him with that.

*****

Willow was not the only student absent from Sunnydale High that Tuesday morning. Xander tried to get through it by imagining that she too was home sick with the flu, that she would be back tomorrow, or the next day. But he knew better. Cordelia would be back tomorrow or the next day, joking about how even the nastiest virus could be a weight-loss blessing in disguise. Buffy would be back today or tomorrow, chafing at the conditions of her release and plotting her next throw-down with Angel. Amy would be back. Doug would be back. Snyder would be back to share his misery with everyone. But Willow wasn’t coming back to Sunnydale High. Not tomorrow. Not the next day. Not ever.

Deciding to skip his second period English class for the second time in the young week, Xander made his way to the library, looking for company in his misery. He found it. Hunkered down at the front reading table, towel over his head and shoulders, steam wafting out around his shrouded face from some kind of earthenware contraption, Rupert Giles was the poster boy for misery. “Hey man,” Xander, teased halfheartedly, “you can’t smoke that stuff in hear.”

“How very...hurmph...very ... amusing,” Giles croaked between coughs.

“Seriously, though,” Xander said with real concern, “why don’t you go home and rest? That’s what everybody else is doing.”

“Everybody else,” Giles reminded him in a hoarse whisper, “isn’t waiting for Buffy.” This was followed by another round of coughing and a deep inhalation of steam. “I have a sacred duty...” more hacking ensued. “A sacred duty....” he tried again, getting no further. “I want to make sure she’s alright.” He finished finally.

“Do you really think she’ll, come to school today?”

The librarian picked up his currently disused glasses from the table and began to clean them. Xander recognized this as a declaration of inner turmoil. “I don’t know,” he admitted at length. “But I can’t very well call her house again.”

“Yeah,” Xander agreed, “I’ve left five messages since I talked to her mom Sunday morning.”

Giles sighed, which set off another round of coughing, and another sigh at the absurdity of physical illness. “I’ve left four myself,” he admitted when he was able to speak again.

“Careful,” Xander warned, “next thing you know, Cordy’ll be accusing you of being in love with Buffy too.”

Giles was grateful that the strangling noise he emitted at that suggestion was masked by another fit of coughing. “Yes...” he murmured catching his breath, “erm quiet. Um, Xander? Don’t you have a class of some sort that you ought to be attending?”

“Not in the strictest sense,” he said with a shrug, seeing no reason why he ‘ought’ to be attending anything. Giles let it go. Between the flu and the rest of his oppressive personal troubles, he couldn’t quite work up the energy to care about Xander’s academic success or lack thereof. Both of them sat for a moment in companionably miserable silence.

As one they looked up at the subtle sound of the library door swinging open. As one they caught their breath, hoping so see Buffy. As one they released it, disappointed at the sight of Oz. “Biology was canceled,” he explained in response to their silent questioning, “because of... biology. You guys are waiting for Buffy.” Xander nodded, though it hadn't been a question. “Mind if I join you?” Oz asked politely, already taking a seat at the table.

“Welcome to the vigil,” said Xander.

Giles shifted uncomfortably but said, “Er... yes, of course. Be my guest.” Unless Xander was imagining things, Oz gave Giles a look. It was a brief look, a subtle look, but not a pleasant one. With it the silence shifted from companionably miserable to gloomily tense.

Into this tense, gloomy silence, stepped Buffy Summers. “Wow,” she said in a small voice, trying in vain to maintain her faltering smile, “I’d ask who died...” Suddenly, she found herself wrapped in Xander’s fierce embrace. Giles half rose himself, but thought better of it, and sat instead staring up at her with large sad eyes filled with things he was unable to say. Even Oz looked torn between relief and sorrow and... maybe something else. It was moving to see him moved, even if she wasn’t exactly sure what direction he was moving in.

At last, Xander let her go and the four of them sat down at the table together. Giles was the first to speak. “How is Willow?” he asked.

It was a natural question. (They must know by now that Willow wasn’t coming back to Sunnydale High, and she was the only person at the table who had seen her since her father’s death.) Still, Buffy had to think a minute to come up with a satisfactory answer. “She’s um... not fine?” she tried to explain, “But she’s... strong... she’s coping. Things are bad though... with her mother. They’re um... mostly talking through their lawyer I think?”

“Dear Lord,” Giles rasped, “that’s terrible.”

Oz made a small noise of derision. Given his usual reserve, it got him everyone’s undivided attention. “So what you’re basically saying is, she’s alone, she’s scared, she’s lost everything, including her parents, her school, and all her friends; but you think she’s _coping_?”

Buffy looked down at her hands. “She...uh...seemed to be...when I saw her this morning at the um, you know, jail,” she mumbled.

“Look,” said Oz, “I know you all have your own drama to deal with and work out, but somebody has to be there for Willow. And I think that somebody should be me. So, I’m not going to be hanging around you guys anymore. Save the world, don’t save the world. I can’t let that be my problem.”

“Come on Oz...” Xander began, but he let his voice trail off to nothing when he saw the look in Oz’s eyes. Weirdly, Oz was not glaring at Buffy, but at Giles.

“Don’t worry about the full moon thing,” Oz went on, making it clear that he was tying up all business with the Slayer and her crew for the foreseeable future. “I’ll figure something out.” With that he walked out of the library.

“Wow,” said Xander into the taunt atmosphere he left in his wake, “behold the wrath of Oz. Why is he blaming you guys so hard for all this?” Buffy sent Giles a furtive questioning look, to which he responded with a curt nod of acknowledgment.

“Hey!” cried Xander, “I saw that. You guys know something that I don’t.”

“A great many things,” said Giles testily.

“Giles!” Buffy scolded, shocked.

“Hey, no,” said Xander getting to his feet, “I get it. Loud and clear. None of my business. It’s only my best friend’s life going to crap. Silly me, all this time, I thought it was my two best friends. Oh well, I guess that’s no surprise with my... uh... limited intellectual abilities. I, uh, guess I’ll catch you guys later, you know if you ever decide I need to know something.”

“Xander, wait!” Buffy called after him, rising to her feet, but he was out the door and gone. Suddenly fuming, she rounded on her Watcher. “What on earth was that?” she demanded.

“I... I’m sorry,” He managed scratchily. “When I feel... stressed and... ill... I don’t have as much patience as I ought to have.” Giles breathed in more steam before succumbing to another bout of coughing. Buffy rolled her eyes. She couldn’t keep up her verbal assault, however well deserved, against such a pathetic target. Instead she flopped down in the chair next to him and patted his hand. Giles squeezed her hand briefly in return and gave her a small, companionable smile before taking his hand away to feel inside the pocket of his tweed coat. He withdrew a small package and set it on the table in front of her.

“A present?” she asked puzzled.

Giles shrugged, “better late than never... I suppose.”

Buffy unfolded what she now saw was a plain white sheet of paper wrapped tightly around a half a dozen little pink pills. On the inside of the paper was a hand written note.

Laying the pills on the table, she read:

_Three by Monday night, three more twelve hours later ought to stop your little lamb from crawling off the altar. Now we are bloody well even. Don’t call me again._

_I know where the bodies are buried because my heart is buried with them. D.P._

 

“A...um...friend of mine...” Giles was saying. Buffy shook her head, letting the hateful note fall from her trembling fingers. She remembered well the last time she’d been called a ‘lamb’ in quite the same way that note implied. She also remembered the dreams she’d had for months afterwards... frantically wrestling with Giles, fighting him for her life, clawing away his face to find that of the Master underneath. Unbidden, she thought of the pragmatic wisdom of Captain Yosarian: ‘The enemy is whoever tries to get you killed.’ But no, Buffy reminded herself, that did not apply here. Whether she was the hunter or the lamb, it was fate that had made her the Slayer, not Giles.

Seeing the note’s effect on Buffy, Giles snatched it up. His eyes grew wide and he literally turned a whiter shade of pale. “Buffy... I’m sorry...” he stammered, “I had no idea... I mean, I knew David was... bitter towards The Council...”

Buffy gave him a look of miserable sympathy. “I guess neither of us has as many friends as we thought.”

“No,” Giles agreed grimly, “I suppose not.”

“Look,” Buffy said, picking up three of the pills in one hand and a glass of water that happened to be sitting on the table with the other, trying to sound more okay than she really felt, “Don’t sweat it.” She downed the pills and the water in one gulp, folding the other three back into the note. Giles looked mildly horrified. “Giles,” she asked shortly, “what?”

“Buffy!” Giles sputtered. He dissolved into a long fit of coughing, through which he never the less managed to scowl at the glass in Buffy’s hand and gesture at his own throat.

“Oh, relax,” Buffy countered, getting a little exasperated with him, “I never get sick.”

Buffy looked up at the clock on the wall above and behind Giles. Still over half an hour until third period. She felt strangely uncomfortable waiting here with him, but deliberately choosing to go somewhere else would have felt even stranger. The thing that had happened between them was just... a thing that had happened, she told herself for the billionth time. She couldn’t let it change who she was around Giles. She just had to get over it. Surely if they both acted normal around each other, consistently, for a long enough period of time, eventually they would start to feel normal around each other again. Surely. Eventually.

Of course, Buffy realized, the pills she had just taken, or more accurately the possibility they existed to prevent, meant that she could not even start to feel normal about her relationship (little r) with Giles until that possibility was resolved. At the moment, however, she found herself feeling almost equally weird about the note. “What does he mean by ‘crawling off the altar’?” she asked uneasily.

Giles sucked in a lungful of steam and coughed again. “It’s a reference,” he explained finally, “a rather sardonic one, to the Council’s position on Slayers... having children. In a roundabout way it’s a biblical allusion. St. Paul calls upon the early Christians to remain pure, holy. There’s a phrase he uses ‘a living sacrifice’, which over the years has become a sort of Council shorthand for the level of commitment that’s expected from Slayers and Watchers alike. If you want to suggest that someone isn’t living up to that standard you would say that that person is ‘crawling off the altar’.”

“Waaaaaiiiiit a minute,” said Buffy incredulously, finally absorbing the implications of what she was hearing, “are you telling me Slayers aren’t _allowed_ to have children.”

“Er... essentially,” Giles admitted uncomfortably. In his experience, no good could come of telling Buffy what Slayers weren't allowed to do. “It’s not quite as clear cut as all that, of course,” he hastened to add. “Many of the longer lived Slayers have eventually become mothers, some with the tacit approval of the Council and... some without. In general however, any serious commitment by a Slayer to anything or anyone other than Slaying is... firmly discouraged. The mission is what matters. Nothing else can be allowed to interfere with that.”

“Um, excuse me,” said Buffy, “but I’m not seeing how that’s the same level of commitment ‘for Watchers and Slayers alike.’”

“Well, I suppose it’s a matter of perspective.” Giles reasoned, “For a Watcher, you see, having at least two children is more or less a positive duty. I dare say there are some on the Council who’d be only too happy to make an exception in my case, though that didn’t stop them from bringing up my... shirking in that regard as an argument against my getting this assignment. God, I can just imagine what Quentin Travers would say if he ever found out—! Well, nobody loves a good I-told-you-so more than a bunch of Watchers.”

“You don’t say?” Buffy teased good-naturedly.

Giles smiled, “Yes,” he said, eyes twinkling, “strange as that may seem.”

But there were other things that bothered Buffy about that note. She tried to isolate what they were. For one thing, it was odd, especially under the circumstances, to actually think about all of the years Giles had lived before she’d known him, before she had been born even. It was even odder to think of the people who had lived those years with him, and what might have become of them. He’d never mentioned working with another Slayer, training her, advising her... burying her. He’d never mentioned _not_ doing those things either.

That and his comment about the ‘longer lived Slayers’ brought up a subject that had been simmering on the back burner of Buffy’s mind for a long time. “Giles?” she asked, suddenly needing to know, “how long _do_ Slayers... you know... usually... live?”

Giles rubbed his temples in a way that suggested he was struggling with more than sinus pressure. “Well...” he said after a long moment, “that’s... hard to say.”

“Say,” Buffy insisted grimly.

“Well...” Giles ruminated in a scholarly tone, looking down into his steaming pot of whatever that was, “Irmatrude Northham was said to be over forty years old when she died in 1789.”

“And since then?” Buffy persisted.

“Erm, Nikky Wood, I suppose, was the longest lived Slayer of this century. She lived to be thirty-one. She had a son incidentally, about four years old when she died. I can think of a couple of others who lived into their late twenties but...”

A brittle laugh escaped Buffy’s lips. “Tell me,” she demanded, “what percentage of Slayers are lucky enough to live so long?”

Giles shifted uncomfortably, but stated the facts. “About one in four Slayers lives to be twenty. About one in ten make it to twenty-five.”

“How many Slayers have there been this century?”

“You are the 27th. Kendra is the 28th.”

Buffy took a deep breath. “Am I...”

“My first Slayer?” Giles anticipated. “No. I’ve been assigned to two previous Slayers. I... uh...I don’t usually like to... think.... It’s a war, Buffy. Whatever anyone says about glory and honor, etc., war is all about death.”

“I’m getting that,” Buffy murmured.

“I buried those girls,” Giles continued, earnestly, “and I kept on with the mission, moved on to the next assignment. That’s what we do, Watchers.” Was there a trace of bitterness in his voice?

“So as soon as I die,” Buffy asked, “you’ll just move on to the next Slayer in line?”

“No,” Giles clarified, “In the first place I—well even if I thought I could... handle it... the assignment process is very... erm... complicated, political. If a Slayer-in-Training is called, usually her existing Watcher remains in service, though not always. In... um... cases like yours, a very experienced Watcher (such as Mr. Merrick) is usually assigned to help the new Slayer grow into her roll. When a Slayer has to be assigned a second or a third Watcher... things get even more complicated. You have all of the new Watchers angling for a chance to get into the field as well as more experienced Watchers wanting to stay on. Favors are called in. Enemies are made. It’s all rather tense.”

“So this David...” Buffy asked, “Is he a... rival Watcher?”

“No,” Giles told her. “Celeste, his... um... his late wife, was the first Watcher of my first Slayer, Amanda.”

“Did they raise her?” Buffy asked, “Was she like Kendra?”

“Not exactly,” Giles explained. “Amanda was identified as a Potential Slayer in 1985. She was thirteen. Generally speaking, when a Potential has reached that age in a... less than receptive culture, we don’t approach them directly with the idea of being a Slayer, at least, not at first. We tracked her for several months. I was in charge of keeping tabs on her whenever she was in London, which was fairly often, because her father was stationed at the U.S. Embassy there. So I was... in the running all along should she need a second Watcher for any reason.”

Something had shifted for Buffy in the course of this conversation. Her fear and anger about the short life expectancy of the Slayer were no longer as immediate as her need to know about Giles and his experience of Watcher/Slayerdom. In all the time she’d known him, he’d never opened up like this.

“The lead Watcher on our tracking team,” he went on, “was moved to Seattle, where Amanda lived. He got a job at her school and started attending her Perish church. We learned that she was interested in gymnastics, so another Watcher was brought in and maneuvered into the position of becoming her coach. That was Celeste. It was obvious that they had a report, and so the Council appointed her as Amanda’s official Watcher. Both she and David became very close to Amanda. She came to trust and rely on them, and within a few months time, they had gradually introduced her to her destiny. I was still essentially in reserve in her case, and also on tracking back up for a couple of other Potentials.

“Then in July of 1987, the Slayer at the time, Constance Gesh, was killed by a demon summoner in Rumania. Amanda was called. Celeste stayed on as her official Watcher. And, for a time, I was assigned primarily to other duties: demon research, occult instruction of future Watchers... but I always kept abreast of what was happening with Amanda, as was my duty. Then, in June of 1990, Celeste was...was killed.”

Suddenly, Giles seemed to be reliving the event he was describing. There was shock and pain in his voice, as if he were just learning of this woman’s death for the first time. Buffy reached for his hand, to comfort him. To her surprise, she found it jerked away. A deep connection of true intimacy, of sharing that had been unconsciously growing between them was broken like a spell. Giles stood and began shuffling through papers at the far end of the table.

“Well then Amanda was with me for two years,” he said hurriedly, without looking at Buffy. “And then in ’94 I was assigned to Christine Laughton, English girl, only lived a few months, and then I was put back on reserved until I was sent here.”

With that, the conversation shut down completely. Buffy wanted desperately to open it back up. The bell rang. Giles stooped over the table, hacking up a lung again. With a deep sigh, she tucked the hate wrapped pills into her jacket pocket, got up and headed to class.

*****

Oz knocked on Willow’s front door around lunch time. He had a large bouquet of bright yellow chrysanthemums which he held out to Sheila when she opened the front door. She was dressed in black and wearing a scarf on her head. She looked at the flowers warily. “I suppose, those are for Willow,” she commented. It hurt and angered Oz to hear the bitterness with which she spoke her daughter’s name, but he kept his expression politely neutral.

“No, actually,” he answered, “they’re for your husband.”

A bleak smile flickered across Sheila’s face. “Please,” she said, taking the bouquet, “come in.”

Willow was there, dressed in black like her mother. Her eyes told Oz she was surprised and happy to see him, but she kept her face as blank as possible. Not a good sign. “Daniel,” she said blandly, “thank you for coming.” Another bad sign. Apparently, he was not supposed to be ‘Oz’, obviously one of the friends her mom already associated with Buffy.

Oz struggled for something appropriate to say in the presence of the Rabi and the dozen or more mourners that filled the dimly lit room. “Well,” he said, “Dr. Rosenberg delivered me,” which was true. It was true for a lot of the kids at Sunnydale High.

“He touched a lot of lives,” said Willow bleakly.

“Yes,” Sheila interjected pointedly, “your father was a good man. He deserves respect.”

“Can I get you something to eat?” Willow asked, ignoring her mother. “There’s a ton of food in the kitchen.”

“I’d like that,” said Oz, following her into the other room.

As soon as they were alone, Willow’s impassive mask melted to reveal an expression of fatigue, grief and desperate need. “Oh, Oz” she cried, “thank God you’re here. You have to get a message to Buffy.”

Oz blinked, taken aback, but rallied quickly. He certainly would have preferred if she had asked for his understanding ear or his shoulder to cry on, but it was Willow’s time of distress and he was willing to be whatever she needed, even if all she needed was a messenger. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll see her at school tomorrow.”

“No,” said Willow, “tomorrow may be too late. And you probably won’t be able to talk to her tonight. We both have a six o’clock curfew. She’s going to have enough trouble getting out at all. You’d better go back to school after lunch. Sorry.”

“Hey, no problem.” He assured her, “I’m a senior so the go and come back thing is pretty much legit. What do you need?”

“A Vampire Slayer,” said Willow grimly, “for my father.”

*****

Buffy returned to the library at 2:30 just as she’d been instructed, to wait for her mother to pick her up at 5:30. It was déjà vu all over again, although this time, she was so far beyond grounded. “Yeah,” said Buffy, explaining the situation to Giles, who seemed to be feeling a little better, “She said, and I quote, ‘because I know Mr. Giles will be there and he’s the only one in that whole place I trust to keep an eye on you.’”

“Well,” he said chagrined, “that’s a bit... ironic to say the least.”

“I thought so too,” Buffy agreed, “But hey, at least I don’t have to make excuses to come here for training, so that’s a good. I’m not sure how I’m going to keep up with my patrols though. I mean, I know I can sneak out, like always, but now if I get caught... I get a little bit more than grounded, ya know?”

“Yes,” Giles agreed, “You’ll certainly need to be very careful.”

“And that’s not just through April, either,” She pointed out, glumly. “At least according to the lawyer. Even if I’m lucky enough to get probation, there’s definitely going to be a curfew involved. Of course, they could always lock me up until I’m 21, or try to.”

Giles brow furrowed. “Who are you using?” He asked, “For a lawyer I mean.”

“My mom’s divorce lawyer, Doug Graff, which I don’t even know why because we have to drive all the way to L.A. to see him, and I don’t think he knows that much about Juvenile Court anyway.”

Giles made a dissatisfied expression then seemed to come to a resolution. “Here,” he said, pulling a card out of his breast pocket, “You need to call my lawyer, Hal Gaston.”

Buffy reached out and took the card from his outstretched hand. Both of them pretended not to notice the spark of energy that seemed to leap across the space where their fingers almost touched but didn’t quite.

“Well...uhm...” said Giles clearing his throat, his voice becoming quiet, edged with guilt. “Hal... has his... erm... his main office in Elmwood, but he keeps an office in Sunnydale as well, so he works quite a bit with the courts in this county. I’ve used him for some... complicated immigration issues, and I know he has extensive criminal experience as well. I don’t know about Juvenile Court specifically, but he has...connections. I suspect it’s _who_ you know around here worse than anywhere.”

“Thanks,” said Buffy, tucking the card into her purse, “It’s nice, having you looking out for me.” Her lovely-sad emerald eyes looked up at him with unbearable gratitude. He gave in to a large sneeze, using it as an opportunity to turn away. Buffy sighed, trying to focus on the homework in front of her. Why did he have to act like that? Like he’d _done_ something to her? It made her feel sad and in a strange way kind of defeated. She didn’t need his remorse. She needed him to snap out of it and be her strong, confident Watcher again. ‘ _Don’t be sorry_ , _be Giles’_ she thought, remembering the one time he’d fallen apart on her worse than this. Oh well. He might be wallowing in guilt again, but at least this time he was on his feet, sober and doing what he could to help her.

Giles sighed too. He knew he was missing the mark, not giving Buffy the comfort and support she needed. “It’s my job to look out for you,” he pointed out, pulling a chair next to hers and laying a hand on her shoulder, “and my privilege. You don’t have to thank me.”

Buffy turned towards him. Their faces were inches apart. “Most people just say ‘you’re welcome’,” she said with mock gravity. Without even thinking, Giles leaned in a little closer. Suddenly, Buffy turned away, blushing crimson. They were no longer alone in the library.

Giles straightened up quickly, clearing his throat. “Oh erm, Oz, hello,” he said, smoothing his suit front self-consciously. “I was just showing Buffy... that is Buffy was just showing me...” he let the sentence die amidst a moderate amount of coughing.

“Just a thought,” said Oz, “poker, not your game.”

“Yes, well...” Giles deflected, “can I help you with something?”

“Actually,” Oz informed him, “it’s Willow who needs your help, or more accurately,” he amended, turning to Buffy, “Willow needs _your_ help. It’s her Dad. He’s been turned.”

“Good Lord,” Giles gasped.

“Is she sure?” Buffy asked.

Oz nodded, “the coroner said he had blood on his lips. It wasn’t his”


	5. Epiphany

“Where is he buried?” Buffy asked worriedly.

“Star of David Cemetery,” Oz informed her.

Buffy cursed quietly. “That’s way on the other end of town, past the University, around Sunset Ridge. I’ll have to get there by sunset, too. No way am I going to take a chance of missing him. He's been dead three days, which is about average.”

“I’ll drive,” Oz offered.

“But,” said Buffy, “what am I going to do about—”

“Your mother,” Giles concluded.  
“Exactly,” Buffy agreed, “she expects me to be waiting here at 5:30, but we need to leave before that.”

The three of them stood for a moment in contemplative silence. “I don’t think the ‘gas leak’ story will work again,” Giles murmured thoughtfully.

"It didn't work before," Buffy reminded him. "I was confined to my room for a month. Officially ”

“Here's a radical suggestion,” Oz said, “You could tell your mom the truth.”

“And she’s going to believe me because...?” Buffy demanded.

“Seeing Dr. Rosenberg rise from his grave might be a pretty good clue,” Oz suggested.

“Hey that’s right!” Buffy responded, with sarcastic enthusiasm, “And getting killed by Angel and his gang (who will show up the minute the sun sets) that should really convince her!”

“Hey,” said Oz, spreading his hands before him, “Just trying to help.”

“Okay,” said Buffy, pacing now, “So my Mom’s coming here and I’m not going to be here. That’s the problem, what can we do about it?”

“Well,” said Giles thoughtfully, “if we can’t....” He paused to sneeze. ” If we can’t satisfactorily explain your absence...” more coughing and sneezing followed.

“If we can’t explain my absence...” Buffy began, smiling now.

“—the police will likely be called.” Giles concluded.

“No they won’t,” Buffy informed him, “because my Mom isn’t going to be here either.”

Giles was puzzled for moment but Oz instantly understood. “Ok,” he said, “how do we stop her?”

“Car trouble, I think” said Buffy.

“That’ll never work,” Giles interjected, “at most it will slow her down for an hour or so. You don’t know when Dr. Ro—the vampire will decide to rise.”

“Which is why we’re not waiting for him to rise,” Buffy informed him, “I’m going to dig him up.” There was a moment of stunned silence. “What?” said Buffy, “Anyone have a better suggestion?” No one did. “So let’s get moving,” Buffy went on. “Giles, you’ll have to stay here to talk to Mom when she calls...”

“But shouldn’t I be...” his protest died in a fit of coughing, concluded with a groan of misery. His symptoms seemed to be coming back with a vengeance. “Right,” he said, “I’ll wait here for your mother to call.”

“We need more people than this, though,” Buffy went on, planning out loud. “We’ve got to dig fast. There’s a pretty high wall, so we can start a little before dark, but the longer we’re there, the more chance we’ll be seen. And the more chance of vampires.”

“We should get Xander,” Oz agreed.

Buffy and Giles exchanged a look. “He’ll do it,” Buffy announced, concluding the unspoken debate. “It’s for Willow. Oz, you’d better be the one to ask him though. Things are kind of...” Buffy started to explain, but she could see that Oz got it. “Okay,” Buffy recapped, “So Xander and I are digging. Giles is here. That leaves you to distract Mom... except... then how are we getting to the cemetery? Cordelia?”

“Out sick,” said Oz.

“Okay,” Buffy replanned, “so that’s me and Oz to dig and Xander to distract Mom... We need more people.”

“I really don’t think there’s anyone else we can trust,” Giles pointed out.

“Fine,” Buffy said, “Then that’s the plan. Oz, see if Xander’s still here. If not, go to his home. Drop him off at the Gallery. Tell him to do something to Mom’s car... I don’t know... something to make it not start... Then maybe he could offer to help her with it... that way he can slow everything down and warn us if she finds a way to leave.”

“I know just the thing,” Oz assured her.

*****

It was dark in the box, dark and rather confining, but it smelled wonderfully of pine resin and dried blood. The demon that couldn’t help thinking of itself as Ira Rosenberg nodded his approval in the silent dark. He was wearing some kind of loose garment that may have been open at the back, but his bloodstained clothes were somewhere in the box with him. Rabi Mike, Demon Ira decided. Again he approved. Rabi Mike was a good Jew, conscientious, detail oriented. It was smart of Sheila to let him handle these things. Sheila paid so little attention to religion, if she’d tried to handle the arrangements herself, she’d have only ended up offending someone on the Rosenberg side of the family.

Of course, they’d all be mightily offended to learn that the mortal remains of Ira Rosenberg hadn’t agreed to stay planted in the dust they came from after all. But, then, if he timed that disclosure just right, they’d be in a position to make their complaints directly to the ‘One True Judge’ themselves. Let Him do something about it if He was going to. Demon Ira wasn’t worried. This Earth was still more a devil’s dominion than not and he intended to walk the Earth a good long time.

That is, if only the sun would go down. Demon Ira could not have told you how he knew that the sun was up or that he needed it to go down. He simply knew. He didn’t fear the sun. He didn’t fear anything, including death. But he was interested in doing a lot of things with the rest of his existence, and bursting into flames was not one of them. He waited.

*****

It was a quarter past five when Joyce finally pushed her last customer out of the Gallery, more or less literally. She had told Buffy to wait for her until five-thirty and she was not about to give her the chance to ‘misunderstand’ and wander off. Besides, she was under court order to have her daughter home by six o’clock. Of course, getting Buffy home was not likely to be her biggest problem, Joyce realized. It was keeping her there. Serial Killer or not, she was starting to think Ted had had the right idea about nailing Buffy’s bedroom window shut, not that she wasn’t perfectly capable of pulling the nails out.

As Joyce turned the key in the lock and headed for the parking lot, she briefly considered cutting down the tree outside Buffy’s window. Knowing Buffy, though, she’d just climb over the roof and come down via the front porch. Lost in these unpleasant thoughts Joyce unlocked her black SUV and got into the vehicle without really even seeing it. She put the key in the ignition and turned. Nothing happened. “Whell!” said Joyce, exasperated, “that’s just great! That’s exactly what I need!” She tried the key one more time, then got out and slammed the door.

As she stood there, fuming, Joyce heard a familiar voice. “Hey there,” said Xander, “need a hand with that flat tire?”

“No,” Joyce started to explain plaintively, “my car won’t—” She looked down along the side of her car to see that the left rear tire was, sure enough, flat as a pancake. Joyce cursed quietly, adding in a slightly louder voice, “I do not have time for this.”

“Do you have a jack,” Xander offered. “I’ll change it for you.”

“Don’t bother,” said Joyce. “The motor won’t start. I’ll have to call a tow truck.”

Buffy’s friend seemed strangely worried by this news. “No!” he shouted, gesturing dramatically to no apparent purpose. Joyce was as startled as she was puzzled. “No,” he repeated, a little more calmly, “uh, jumper cables. Yeah, what you need is someone to give you a jump... start. Not—that is... I mean... I don’t have a car or anything.” 

The boy was actually blushing. Joyce sighed deeply but resisted the urge to roll her eyes. He was trying so hard to be helpful. For an instant, she wondered if he had sabotaged her car just to get the chance to rescue her, but that was crazy, she realized. She was starting to be as delusional as Buffy. This kid wasn’t interested in her, just embarrassed by his poor choice of words.

Smiling as warmly as she could manage, Joyce excused herself and started to walk back towards the Gallery. Suddenly, she found Xander blocking her path, trying frantically to explain something about how a tow truck would take too long and hadn’t she better just let him fix her flat and wait for one of the drivers of the nearby cars to come and jumpstart her.

Joyce wasn’t buying it. “Alright,” she said, folding her arms, “Where’s Buffy? What kind of crazy stunt are you kids trying to pull? You had better tell me now because I have had it! I will find out what is going on and when I do I’m going to put a stop to it, do you understand me, Alexander Harris!”

“Hey,” said Xander backing away with his palms splayed before him, “There’s nothing going on. I was just trying to help.”

“Well then,” Joyce said, “you won’t mind coming inside with me while we call Mr. Giles and make sure Buffy is right where she’s supposed to be.”

“Not a bit,” Xander assured her scowling. The two walked back to the gallery in stony silence. Xander tried very hard to appear merely indignant rather than panicked. It was supposed to take him until six at least to change Joyce’s flat, only then to discover that the car wouldn’t start. As it was, she was about to call a tow driver, who could tighten her battery cables, fix the flat and have her back on the road in no time. His only hope was that Giles would have some kind of bright idea. But then, he was Giles, so that was actually a pretty good hope.

*****

Giles wanted to pick up the phone on the first ring, but it took him until the third to manage it. His symptoms were getting even worse. He wanted desperately to lie down on his own—Couch. He sighed heavily. “Hello?” he squawked nasally. 

“Mr. Giles,” Joyce asked without preamble, “Where’s Buffy?” There was so much tension and suppressed anger in voice that for a moment he thought she knew what he had done. 

“She’s...Ahsh... right...Ahshew... here,” he managed between sneezes operating on the assumption that whatever she did or didn’t know she would prefer to hear that Buffy was where she had been told to be, “been here... Ah...all...Ah...afternoon Ahshew... doing her... Ashew...her homework.” Joyce sighed with audible relief. Giles was relieved with her... or possibly against her. “Is everything... alright,” he asked, now that he could be fairly certain of her answer. 

Already, she was shifting from relieved to embarrassed. “Oh” she fumbled, “I’ve just been having a little car trouble and for some reason I got the idea—Oh, Xander, I’m so sorry...”

Giles suppressed a sigh of exasperation. Typical Xander Harris! No doubt he’ d overplayed his part and aroused her suspicions. “Hey, no sweat,” Xander said loud enough to be heard on Giles' end, “I think I'll just go see what trouble I can DIG UP to get into!” 

“Good job, Joyce,” Mrs. Summers scolded herself, in the wake of his door slamming exit, seeming to forget that Giles was still on the line. 

“Well...” he croaked awkwardly, “so...your...erm... your car...”

“Are you alright?” Joyce asked, finally making mention of the fact that he was barely able to speak.. 

“Oh, I’ll be alright,” he assured her between continued bouts of coughing and sneezing.. 

“Well,” said Joyce skeptically, “I hope so. They say this flu bug is supposed to be pretty bad. People are coming into the Gallery in surgical masks.” 

“Yes,” he mused, “You Americans do tend to panic a bit about these things.” 

“I see,” said Joyce coolly, “yes, well, be that as it may... as I said, I’m having trouble with my car. I’m about to call Triple A, but I’m afraid I’m going to be a little late picking Buffy up.”

“Oh well,” said Giles, “that’s quite alright. I’ll be here at any rate, just... catching up on a few things. Take your time.”

“Oh, I’m sure I won’t be too long,” she assured him, warming back up a little. 

“You know,” said Giles, grasping for a topic, not wanting her to hang up, “It occurs to me that... um... that... Buffy could benefit from something to do of an evening... to keep her out of trouble.” 

“She probably could” Joyce agreed seriously, “She’s been at a loose end ever since she was cut from the Cheerleading squad. I swear, I don’t even know where she goes at night anymore... and now this!”

“Yes,” Giles encouraged her, “the whole situation is a bit... alarming.” And that was true, but Giles couldn’t help feeling that he was being disloyal as well as dishonest by speaking of Buffy’s ‘situation’ as if he had nothing to do with it. He thought of the preacher in that silly old American story by the silliest of all American writers, Nathaniel Hawthorn, who had secretly tortured himself to death in atonement for allowing his mistress to face the penalties of their adultery alone. Giles was torturing himself he realized, and a lot of good it was doing Buffy. 

“So what were you thinking of?” Joyce asked. 

“Well... I...” Rupert stammered. He hadn’t been really, other than a vague thought that Buffy needed an excuse to get out of the house most nights and that he needed to keep Joyce on the phone for a while right now. To that end, he fumbled blindly ahead, “I really don’t know... some sort of gymnastics classes or something I suppose. Or Martial Arts perhaps.”

Joyce seemed to think about this for a moment, “There are some Thai Chi classes as the gym at the Mall... but I’d have to leave the Gallery awfully early to take her to the afternoon classes. And she can’t go to the evening ones; she’s...um no longer allowed out after six o’clock... so that pretty much spoils that whole idea now that I think about it.”

“You mean to tell me she’s not allowed to go anywhere after six pm, even if you’re with her?” Giles asked, as if hearing this condition of Buffy’s release for the first time, hoping to stir up Joyce’s obvious frustration with this inconvenient restriction. 

“That’s right,” said Joyce, “and it looks like we’re going to be late the very first night. I honestly don’t know how we’re going to keep this up until Buffy goes back to court in April.”

Giles pulled out his pocket watch and took a glance. It was just coming up on 5:35. Buffy would only be beginning her work at the cemetery. Even if Xander found a way over there to warn her and to help dig, how much could he really do to speed up the process? 

“Well,” said Joyce, “I’d better get going. I need to call that tow truck.” 

Giles was suddenly struck with desperate inspiration. “Well, what seems to be the trouble?” he asked. “Maybe I can help.” 

“Well,” said Joyce, “There’s a flat tire, and the... battery I guess... but I don’t want you to put yourself to any trouble... especially with you not feeling well... and with Buffy...”

“Nonsense,” said Giles trying very hard to suppress a cough, “I’ll just drop Buffy by your house, to make sure she’s home by six, then I’ll come see what I can do.”

“So, you did finally get your car back then?” she asked. 

“Er... yes... very thoroughly cleaned too. I feel perhaps I ought to send a thank you note to the police station.” There was an awkward silence. “Well, at any rate, let me just lock up here, I’ll drop Buffy by the house on the way, and I’ll see you in about... twenty minutes.” 

They said their goodbyes and Giles quickly locked up the library and headed for the cemetery. He hadn’t gone far when he found Xander, taking the same route, jogging along at a fair rate of speed. “Get in,” he said, opening the door. 

“Thanks,” said Xander, breathing heavily as they got back underway. 

“I told Joyce I’d drop Buffy by the house and come pick her up,” Giles explained. That should buy us at least half an hour of inertia, even if I don’t make it back before she gives up on me.” Of course, Giles realized, it’d take twenty minutes just to drive to the graveyard and back.

*****

Sweat stung Buffy’s eyes but she ignored it. Oz worked alongside her in grim, urgent silence. She was glad to have the help. This was not the kind of work where Slayer strength was a huge advantage. No matter how strong Buffy was, she could still only lift one shovel full of dirt at a time. And time was running short.

They were getting close, but close wasn’t good enough. The sun was sinking rapidly. It had already fallen beneath the cemetery wall. It’s rays were too weak and slanted even now to provide much protection. Vampires could start showing up en mass at any time. 

Buffy had no doubt that Angel knew exactly where she would be right now. Because it was no accident that she was here, in this place, at this moment. She was exactly where he wanted her to be. If he had only wanted to add Dr. Rosenberg to his army of vampiric spawn, he could have hidden him in any of a million dark, nasty crevices in the bowels of this nightmare infested town.

The only reason Angel would ever have left the body lying in the open where Sheila could get her hands on it was so that Buffy would know exactly where, if not exactly when, to expect the demon to rise. Because he knew she would have no choice but to try and stop it. It was a perfect trap, the kind you can see coming but still can't avoid. 

Fortunately, there were no sewer grates around here and no mausoleums in the Jewish cemetery. The vampires would have to travel topside and come through the gate or over the wall, so at least they should be able to see them coming. It was just barely possible that they might be done and on their way before Angel arrived, though that hope was growing dimmer by the second.

A part of Buffy was glad. She was tired a sharing a planet with Angel, ready to have it over. She was really more worried about Oz’s safety than her own. She’d have told him to leave, but he wouldn’t have, so there was no reason to waste time arguing about it. 

At last, they heard the sound of shovels clonking on wood. Buffy put her finger to her lips and gave Oz a boost up out of the grave. She brushed aside as much of the remaining dirt as possible. Crouching against the side of the pit, slightly above and to the side of the coffin, the Slayer pulled hard on the simple iron latch, breaking it in two.

In one smooth motion, she pushed pack the lid and leaned over the open pine box, stake in hand, ready to strike. There he lay, eyes closed, mouth relaxed in a perfect expression of peace. He was clothed in long robes of flowing white, his glasses perched serenely on his nose, looking at once scholarly and angelic. Of course, Buffy knew only too well the risk of being deceived by angelic appearances. 

Buffy’s mind was racing as she brought up her arm to strike. What was actually supposed to happen if you staked a potential vampire before the demon was risen in it? Did the demon invade the body at the time of death, or at the time of rising? Would the stake itself awaken the vampire? Would it turn to dust or simply remain dead? Would it make any difference to the condition of the soul? Should she be trying to stake more vampires before they rose?

Alternatively, if the demon did not enter until the time of rising, would staking what was currently only a dead body keep it out at all? Would it be necessary to leave the stake in? Should she cut off his head just in case? Buffy had no answers to these questions. There was no time to contemplate them now. 

Falling upon the mortal remains of Ira Rosenberg, she plunged her stake deep into the upper left side of his chest through the ribcage, below the breast bone. Ira’s eyes flew open, filled with shock and terror. But, as they morphed from brown to yellow in a face that became a snarling, demonic mask, shock and terror were replaced by sneering hatred.

“Fool!” he hissed, grabbing the stake from his own chest and striking Buffy in the throat with the butt of it. Buffy coughed and sputtered for breath, struggling to understand what was happening. She knew her aim had been exact. 

Seizing the moment, Demon Ira got his hands around his attacker’s throat. In the dim glow of the fading sunset, he recognized her, with some surprise, as Buffy Summers, Willow’s little friend from school. She really was a good friend Ira thought, coming out here and basically throwing away her own life in an attempt to keep this body in the ground where it belonged. It was touching really. The only trouble was it didn’t quite seem to be working out that way.

The Summers girl was surprisingly strong, Ira realized. She wretched herself out of his grasp as if he had been no more than a middle aged physician after all. Maybe he only felt like he should have been supernaturally strong and powerful. Maybe what little sunlight there was was getting to him. He didn’t know what the problem was. What he did know was that he was fighting this girl for his very existence, and she did not seem to be giving up, or tiring.

*****

When Giles turned into the curve around Sunset Ridge and saw the body lying across the road in front of him, he felt absolutely no temptation to stop and try to render assistance. This was one of the oldest tricks in the vampire book because it worked so well, on almost anyone. Rupert Giles knew better. He was tempted to stomp on the accelerator and run right over it, but on the off chance it was an actual human being, he swerved around. That was a mistake. 

Three things happened at once that should not have. The Citron weaved around the body, into the oncoming lane, at the very center of the curve, coming within inches of the narrow shoulder and the precipitous drop below. Giles involuntarily closed his eyes and relaxed his grip on the wheel, giving in to a sneeze. The ‘body’ rose into a low crouch and shoved the car sideways with all its vampiric might. 

The wheels lost contact with the pavement. Suddenly, Giles and Xander realized that they were airborne, tumbling sideways in space. Just as suddenly, Xander realized that they had landed hard against some kind of solid object in the darkness.

Giles lay unconscious against the spider webbed safety glass of the driver’s side window, which was situated downhill from the passenger’s side at a fairly steep angle. Blood ran freely from a gash in his forehead on the downhill side. Blood. Vampires. Ugly death come to play. 

Xander felt under the seat, knowing there was supposed to be a flashlight. Either it had rolled free in the crash, or it had never been replaced after that weekend’s police search. Giles still hadn’t moved or uttered a word, but Xander could hear his ragged breathing. 

Bracing himself against the seat and the steering column so that he wouldn’t fall on top of him, Xander unfastened his seatbelt and reached down to turn Giles’ head for a closer look at his wound. He couldn’t see much, but he could tell he needed something to stop the bleeding. 

There was a pile of something spilled against the back left window; a cardboard box full of apparently random items: several flimsy pieces of paper... a tire gauge... jumper cables... a flashlight. Flashlight! The contents of the vehicle, boxed up and inventoried by the police.

Xander turned on the flashlight. In its relative brightness, he quickly found something to press against the wound: a sturdy pink cloth, filthy but absorbent looking, of the type use to clean windshields at the last lingering full service gas stations of his childhood. 

Placing the flashlight in his mouth, Xander held the cloth as hard as he could against Giles’ head while he rummaged among the scattered contents of the box for something to hold it in place. His hand closed around something slender and stretchy. 

When he saw it in the light, he almost dropped it. Laughing nervously at himself, Xander tied the bra around Giles’ head as tightly as he could, trying to put maximum pressure on the place where the blood was actually coming out. It was a front clasp design. The two cups at the tying ends made a big floppy bow on the side of Giles’ head opposite the wound. 

Xander tried not to think about how the garment had come to be there. The image of two middle aged teachers going at it in the back seat, or at all, didn’t fit comfortably in his mind. He turned his attention back to the crisis at hand. 

They had to get out of here. He hadn’t heard any vampires scrabbling downhill towards the car, so they’d probably gone on ahead to attack Buffy. But depending on how badly she kicked their butts there was a good chance the survivors would eventually return, hungry for blood and payback. Even if they didn’t, Giles needed a doctor, and they were miles from a phone.

*****

Six o’clock came and went. Joyce tried the house again, then the library. She left messages on both machines. Finally, at ten after, she called Triple A, just as she should have done half an hour earlier. She was told that she would have to wait a further fifteen minutes.

While she waited, Joyce began to think of how little she really knew Rupert Giles. Her gut had always told her he was someone she could trust, that he was kind, sensitive and competent. That he really cared about Buffy. So, where was he, and where was Buffy? 

The answer to the second question was obvious. She’d gone gallivanting off, in defiance of her mother and the Del Bacco County Juvenile Court, with whomever she was currently 'sorta dating'. No doubt another denizen of whatever cesspool of crime and insanity had spawned ‘Angel’ if not the murderer himself. 

Unless... No, it was too terrible even to think. Joyce was sure that Mr. Giles had been held up, she hoped not literally. While it was definitely true that he had taken a special interest in Buffy, had even come by the house a few times, she was sure that it was completely innocent, professional. 

It did seem like an extraordinary coincidence that Angel should steal his car in order to ‘kidnap’ Buffy, but Joyce assumed that was Buffy’s doing. She’d always thought of Mr. Giles as a positive influence on her daughter. Of course, she had to remind herself, she had always thought of Willow as a positive influence too; a good, sensible girl so unlike the type Buffy used to run with in L.A.

Joyce didn’t know what to think anymore. She didn’t know where to turn or whom to trust. At six twenty-five exactly, the tow truck pulled up alongside her car. At least she could still count on Triple A.

*****

Seconds stretched into minutes as Oz stood staring helplessly from the edge of the grave at the two figures struggling below. If the vampire had ever once gotten on top, he supposed he could have leapt down on top of him, but as it was, he would have been leaping on to Buffy’s back, which he was pretty sure would not qualify as helping. 

He held a shovel before him, blade first, ready to swing from the shoulder with both hands, like a baseball bat, but he had no other weapons. He scanned the gate area and all along the perimeter of the cemetery. No sign of backup vampires so far, but he was sure they were on their way. Looking back towards the battle of the pine box, searching for an opening, he remained alert for the sound of approaching cars. 

Oz wished he had a cigarette lighter, almost enough to wish he smoked. He wondered if there might be one of Devon’s in the van. If so, he had an idea.

*****

Buffy was getting more than a little frustrated. This was supposed to be a solemn mission of mercy, not an all night work out. She had plunged her stake into Ira Rosenberg’s chest at least a half a dozen times, all along the left side and even once on the right, every conceivable place a person’s heart should have been. 

His white robes where ripped to shreds revealing most of his pallid chest and the huge, ugly seems where he had been sown back together following his autopsy. Autopsy! 

“You know,” Buffy panted, “I just don’t believe your heart is in the right place anyone, Dr. Rosenberg.” 

A mean laugh came from deep in Demon Ira’s throat, so different from the one the good doctor had had in life. “My, my,” he grunted, “no... respect... for the dead.”

“I’m the kind of girl who laughs at a funeral,” Buffy confirmed with cheerful bravado. Somehow, the heart thing crystallized matters in Buffy’s mind. She was no longer fighting Willow’s father. He was not the man he had been, and she was able to treat him the same as any other vampire, albeit a pretty feisty one.

He had managed to get both hands on the stake again, so that they were both holding it between them, pointing to the side rather than at anyone’s chest in particular. “Getting tired yet, little Buffy?” he asked nastily. 

“Not... a... bit,” she grunted, though she really was starting to feel it. 

Demon Ira smiled. “They’re coming for me,” he said serenely. “I can feel them. They’re almost here.” The next thing he felt was the top of Buffy’s skull hitting him in the face.

*****

At last, through a break in the trees, Angel saw the six-sided wrought-iron star that dominated the huge swinging gate of the Star of David Cemetery. He motioned for his minions to follow him, swiftly and silently across the clearing that stood between them and the gate.

As they all broke the tree line, they were met by an amusing sight. A pint sized, red headed figure (whom Angel recognized as a Sunnydale student and sometimes werewolf frequently seen with Willow at the Bronze) was crouched in the shadow of a van with the door open. He was holding a shovel with what looked like a ball of wet socks tied to one end. 

Angel smelled gasoline and smiled. So, this kid was ready for a fight, was he? Had himself a weapon and everything. The vampires continued to advance slowly, nonchalantly, now that they had seen what Buffy’s forward defenses were reduced to. 

As they got closer, they could see that the boy held a cigarette lighter, already aflame, in his other hand. They nudged each other, picturing the little human holding his tiny flame to those gas soaked rags under his own nose. This was going to be absolutely hilarious. 

Suddenly, as if he had finally comprehended the danger he was in, the kid leapt into his vehicle and slammed the door, letting his shovel lance dangle absurdly out of the window. At the same moment, he fired the engine and tossed the lighter like a grenade at the end of his makeshift weapon. Instead of flickering out and falling uselessly to the ground, it stayed lit and ignited the torch end of the shovel at a safe distance from the vehicle.

The kid had taped the lighter button down. Now, the young werewolf revved the engine and barreled straight into the crowd of vampires, his flaming lance going before him. It wasn’t funny anymore.

*****

Xander tried to stand into a sort of crouch, using the driver’s side of the vehicle as a floor so that he could heave upwards on the passage door and create an escape hatch. The nose of the car pitched forward alarmingly, forcing him back toward the center of the cabin. Whatever that side of the car was resting against, it wasn't solid ground. 

Giles whimpered, but when Xander held his eyes open and shined the flashlight into them, they remained fixed and dilated. His false memory of real combat medical training told him that this was very, very bad. The smell of gasoline was beginning to permeate the interior of the vehicle. Also not good. 

Xander wondered if he’d have better luck trying to open one of the rear doors, but he didn’t love the idea of climbing over the seat. If there wasn’t enough support back there, they might go tumbling into darkness again.

He shined his flashlight through the unbroken left rear window. It revealed far more that the shattered driver’s window had. Empty space. A bleak hillside dotted with spindly trees. A leafy bough, hanging much too near to belong to any of them. Looking through the windshield on that side, he saw the same things. 

The car was resting against a single tree, ready to pinwheel off into the night if he moved too far forward or backward. Xander thought about this for a moment, trying to imagine that it was some kind of combat exercise, a puzzle to be solved. He needed to stand to have the leverage to push the door open, but he could not stand too far forward or back. He needed to stand on the tree, he realized, more or less exactly where Giles’ head was. 

Moving carefully, Xander leaned Giles as much as he could up the steep incline towards the passenger side and scuttled over him. The window glass was slick with blood, but an experimental kick or two cleared away most of the cracked material, allowing him to plant his sneakers directly on bark. Heaving upward with all his might, he managed to get the door open while causing the car to rock only slightly. 

Scuttling back over Giles’ inert form, Xander climbed up from the depths of the car. Leaning back into the wreck, he tried to heave Giles up by the shoulders, but he was too heavy to be lifted vertically in this position. Losing his grip on the librarian, Xander stumbled back against the car, causing it to rock alarmingly. This was no good he realized, scrambling back up the hill a few feet. He needed help.

*****

Angel cursed fluently under his breath as he circled back through the trees to approach the gate another way. He had wanted his minions to see him get the best of Buffy. Now they were scattered, several of them killed or worse, badly burned. 

He didn’t need more convalescents on his hands. He had Spike for that. He was supposed to be running a vampire gang, not a charity hospital. He made a mental note to move both Willow and her furry little friend to the top of his hit list. 

In the meantime, audience or no, nothing was going to stop him from having a little fun with Buffy. Creeping along the edge of the high stone wall, working his way back towards the gate, Angel kept an eye out for her. He could smell her sent in the air.

Vaguely, he wondered if she had disposed of Rosenberg yet, not that it really mattered. He had already served his primary purpose in keeping Buffy occupied for a couple of crucial days. He was exceeding expectations by luring her here tonight. It would be nice if he could be available to pay a visit to his wife and daughter later, but you can’t have everything. 

When he reached the open gate, Angel trailed a hand lazily around the Star of David. It didn’t burn him like the cross and for some reason he had always found this both reassuring and amusing. But this time something was different. His hand was not burned, but he pulled back against his own volition as if he had been. 

Angel's mouth curled into a self-deprecating smile. He had merely been startled by the brush of something unexpected against his fingertips. His eye now came to rest on a denim jacket (oversized for Buffy but not as oversized as his leather one) that hung from the cemetery gate. As he held it to his face to drink in her intoxicating scent, he noticed a strange (chemical but not at all detergent) odor underlying that delicious smell. 

Angel checked the pockets and found the tiny wad of paper. Having an odd feeling what it would be, he carefully he unfolded it and emptied the three tiny pick pills into his other hand. His smile broadened as his catlike eyes cut through the darkness to read the confirmation of what he had found.

As he stood crushing those three little pills with the heel of his boot, he wished he had a pen to make a little addition to the note, to let Buffy know who she could thank for this wondrous opportunity to say yes to life. Then, with a burst of quiet glee, he realized there was an even better way to send his regards. 

When he had placed the folded scrap of paper back inside Buffy's coat pocket, Angel hung it on the opposite side of the gate and reached out to caress the star again. But once again, he felt compelled to pull back. There was a change in the quality of the air. He had the sense that something still and powerful watched within those gates, something disturbed from a long rest.

Scanning the cemetery for a glimpse of the unseen power, Angel found his eye arrested by the sight of a white marble statue. It was the figure of a woman in a following robe, her piercing gaze aimed directly at the gate. She glowed iridescent in the moonlight. 

There was no moonlight. 

Feeling ridiculous, Angel tried to assure himself that the prickling he felt along his scalp was no more than superstition. Besides, even if there was something real and powerful within the cemetery wall, he too was real and powerful. He could deal. 

Not allowing himself to think about it any further, Angel flung himself through the open gate. He was flung back again. 

The statue was becoming brighter by the second, now indisputably lit from within. Her hair and her robe were no longer frozen in an imitation of movement. The marble was actually flowing. In her eyes, there was a glow of a different kind begging to grow. 

Shrieking with rage and horror, Angel pulled the collar of his jacket up over his head and scrambled for the tree line. He just had time to curl into a ball, his face in the dirt, when the sudden burst of sunlight filled the night sky. 

If anyone who knew Daniel Osborne could have seen his face at that moment, they would have been sure the world was coming to an end. Oz’s eyes widened by increments to twice their normal size. His mouth hung slightly open as he watched the field of scattered vampires ignite like so many birthday candles. It lasted only seconds, but in those seconds was contained all the light and hope of a bright new day. 

Buffy and Ira stopped dead still in their struggle. One of her hands was still buried deep in his chest. They stared at one another in disbelief. Flames began to dance along his skin. Strange flames. Pale fames. Cold flames. With a shriek and a wisp of smoke, the demon was burned out of him.

Before her eyes, in the glow of what now seemed to be ordinary moonlight, his face a mask of pure serenity, lay the body of Ira Rosenberg. Buffy was holding his heart in her hand. She released it, leaving it where it belonged. Her arm was covered in his blood. She wiped it onto his torn white robes, leaving that where it belonged as well. 

Heaving herself, up from the coffin, Buffy shut the lid behind her and scrambled up to the edge of the grave. She peered over the side, searching for the source of the mysterious light. There was nothing unearthly that she could see.

Perhaps someone, somewhere had preformed a spell on Dr. Rosenberg’s behalf. Perhaps his Rabi actually knew how to pray for the soul effectively. Or maybe, Buffy realized, it was something about this place. It was called the Star of David. What was the sun but a star after all?

Shivering, Buffy crawled up out of the grave. Silently, she began filling in the earth with her shovel. Moments later, Oz joined her and they worked once again in silence. Buffy didn't know how to explain what she had seen. It was like nothing in her experience. All she really knew was that, one way or another, a miracle had happened. The body and soul of Ira Rosenberg were at rest.

*****

The lightning caught Xander by surprise. It couldn’t have been nearby because he never saw a bolt of electricity, but it was bright. Strangely, it left him with the feeling that a storm was lifting, although the night so far had been calm. He stood stock still on the hillside between the road and the capsized car gazing up at the sky for a full three minutes, waiting for the sound of thunder that never came. 

His unfulfilled anticipation left him with a strange mixture of hope and confusion. He felt as though something important had happened, but he didn’t know what it was. Whatever it was; though, he was forced to admit, it didn’t change the dire circumstances in which he now found himself. He couldn’t afford to gaze up at the sky any longer. He had to find help to get Giles out of that car. 

Scrambling up to the road was harder than he would have thought. The hillside was covered with a mixture of sandy soil and small, lose stones that made it hard to get a firm footing. He sipped back down twice, almost losing his balance and sliding into the valley below. Finally, he crisscrossed his way up by a rout that still had all of its trees standing, reaching the road a few yards west of the crash, nearer the cemetery side than the back-to-town side of the huge, sweeping curve. 

Xander stood undecided a moment, not knowing which way to walk, afraid to walk either way in case he couldn’t find his way back to this place in the dark. He longed for the sight of headlights, which could mean Buffy, or at least help of some kind. He dreaded the sight of headlights, which more than likely would mean vampires. 

Finally, he made a decision. Although the night was cool, he removed the long-sleeved shirt that he was wearing open like a jacket, and stood shivering in a plain white tee. He tied the shirt to a branch near the gap in the trees where the Citron could be easily seen by anyone shining a flashlight down slope. He didn’t worry that marking the site would make it any easier for the vampires to find. The smell of blood would lead them there, like sharks. 

Once again, he had second thoughts about leaving, even to find help. What if the vampires came back and found Giles helpless and alone? Then again... what if they came back and found Xander and Giles still effectively alone and more or less helpless?

It was an insoluble problem, even if he had had all the time in the world to think about it. Either course of action could cost either Giles or Xander his life. Either could be construed later as heroism or cowardice, depending on how it turned out. The fact was, he didn’t have all the time in the world. He needed to make a choice. He made an easy, familiar one. He set off to find Buffy.

*****

The process of filling in the grave went a lot faster than digging it up. Slayer strength was highly useful for pushing a huge mound of dirt into an open pit. Within a very few minutes, Buffy and Oz looked at one another and, without even the need for a nod, hoisted their shovels and began walking back towards the van. 

Nearly to the gate, Oz turned and looked at something. Buffy followed his gaze. There in the midst of the headstones stood the figure of a tall, slender woman in white marble. Her long hair was frozen in the moment of being blown back from her face be an unfelt wind. 

There was something unsettlingly familiar about the shape of her face, particularly around the eyes, which seemed to be looking right at Buffy. Oz must have felt it too, because he stopped in his tracks and began walking back towards the statue. Buffy did the same. 

The resemblance was not uncanny. Her chin was not the same. Her mouth was not the same. Her nose was not exactly the same. But as the two teens stood and gazed up at the marble goddess, there was no denying the fact that they were looking into the eyes of Willow Rosenberg.

At the base of the statue, below her bare feet, was inscribed the name ‘Rachel Gardien’. On the feet themselves were carved two symbols. On her right foot, the Star of David. On her left, it’s unique lines and curves etched in Buffy’s mind by the cares of another lifetime, was a particular interpretation of the cross forever associated with the work of Josephus DuLac. 

Buffy shivered. “Come on,” she said to Oz, “I’ve got to get home.”

“Yeah...” said Oz vaguely as if he were only partly aware of Buffy’s presence, like one who hears a sound from the waking world filtering through into his dreams, but he turned and followed her back to the van.

*****

Headlights. Standing on the narrow shoulder of the blacktop road, looking around the next bend, coming from the direction of the cemetery, Xander definitely saw headlights. What did headlights mean again? Either Buffy or Vampires. No way to know.

If they were vampires, they could smell him hiding there in the dark. If it was Buffy and he missed her... Xander began sweeping his flashlight frantically across the road. Would that even be seen by a car, within the glow of its own headlights?

The vehicle was approaching quickly now. It would be here any second. Xander stepped out into the middle of the road, waving his arms. The van screeched to a halt. Oz’s van. Thank God. 

Oz braked hard, but he still had to swerve a little to keep from running Xander over. He was bruised and filthy, sanding in the middle of the road waving frantically with a flashlight. There was blood on his hands. 

Xander rushed to the passenger door of the van, just as Buffy bounded out. Buffy knew he hadn’t walked here all the way from the Gallery. Besides, something about the way his face was scraped and bruised said not ‘fight’ but ‘car crash.’

Buffy had a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Where’s Giles?” she asked. 

Xander jerked his head towards the shoulder of the road on the downhill side, “down here” he said, starting in that direction, “about twenty feet from the road.” 

He scrambled down the hill trough a car length gap in the foliage, edged with splintered trunks and stumps. Buffy followed. Oz put on his emergency flashers and repositioned the van so that it was closer to the spot and blocked less of the road. 

Buffy’s throat tightened when she saw the car. Giles' gray Citron was lying on its side, supported by nothing but a single thick tree. The passenger door was ajar, standing strait up, like the escape hatch on a space capsule. Giles was inside. 

Xander must have seen the look on Buffy’s face. “He’s alive,” he assured her as they scrambled down to the wreck. “At least, he was ten minutes ago.” Something about the way he said this was not altogether reassuring. 

When they reached the car and peered in, Buffy could see why. The beam of the flashlight fell across Giles unconscious form. He was more or less seated on the driver’s side door with his upper body slumped in the angle made by the back and bottom of the bench style front seat.

Xander had obviously tried and failed to pull him vertically through the passenger door. There was blood all over his face and clothes as well as everywhere else in the vehicle. His head had been bandaged with some kind of a pink cloth, tied in place with what looked like a white nylon strap. 

Buffy leaned down through the opening and lifted his head gently to check the pulse in his neck. Her eyes widened when she saw what was really holding his bandage in place. It was so absurd that, even under the circumstances, she could have laughed, but then she would have had to have wept. Instead, she stuffed everything down, trying to keep it cool as she felt for proof of life. There it was, weak, but steady. Her heart resumed beating. She could breathe again. 

Suddenly, Buffy was filled with knowledge, with clarity. Giles was not a parent to her, not a mentor, not a friend, not a lover or a not-a-lover. He was Giles. Just Giles, the only one in the world. He was precious to her, uncategorizable, irreplaceable. She loved him with a love that didn’t have to ask what kind of love it was, that didn’t care at this moment what she needed or wanted from him, but only what he needed from her. Tears welled up in her eyes, but there was no time for tears. 

Turing to Xander, Buffy said, “I’m gonna lean in and pull him out. I need you to sit right here and put pressure on my feet so that I can’t slip and fall in, okay?” Xander nodded and did as she asked. Buffy placed Giles facing her with his head and right arm over her left shoulder, his left arm over her right shoulder, locked her arms around his chest and pulled. Out he came, dead weight, like a corpse. But he was breathing. 

The car tipped slightly forward. The tree made a cracking sound. Buffy and Xander scrambled backwards up the slope, lugging Giles with them. The back half of the car flipped up into the space they had just vacated. The vehicle pin-wheeled off of the breaking tree and down the hillside. 

Xander screamed. 

“Holly crap!” Buffy shouted. 

“Wow,” said Oz, looking down from above. Then he turned around and opened the van doors so that Buffy and Xander could put Giles in the back. Buffy knelt by Giles head, Xander by his feet as Oz got behind the wheel. 

“We need to get him to—” Xander began. 

“Sunnydale General,” Oz concluded, “Already on my way.”

“Ohhhh,” Giles groaned. Then he murmured something that might or might not have been ‘Buffy’ or ‘mercy’ or any other two syllable word ending in a long E. 

“Giles!” Buffy gasped, tears spilling down her cheeks now, “I’m here, I’m here, can you hear me? Giles can you hear me? Hold on, please hold on!” 

Xander held out the flashlight to Buffy. He was going to ask her to shine it in Giles’ eyes, to see if they reacted. Something stopped him. It was as if Buffy and Giles were alone in the van. It was like he wasn’t there at all and had no right to be. 

Buffy cradled Giles' head in her lap, whispering soothingly. “Buffy,” he murmured a little more clearly, “the... fire... we have to get... out.”

Buffy put the back her hand to Giles’ forehead the way her mother had done to hers a million times. “You’re burning up,” she fretted. 

“Yes!” Giles agreed hysterically, trying feebly, but frantically to rise, “The Fire! The Fire! Jenny! Jenny! We have to get out!”

“Shussssshhhh,” whispered Buffy, rubbing his cheek, “It’s all right. It’s alright. You’re safe now. Everyone’s safe. Everything is going to be alright.” But her face was etched with pain and fear. “He has a high fever,” she explained to Xander. “How much further?” she shouted to Oz. 

“Ten minutes the fastest way,” He replied, “That’s if we don’t stop at your house.”

“Don’t stop,” said Buffy. 

“Buff,” Xander pointed out gently, “You have to go home. You’re not going to be much good to him in jail.”

Buffy cursed. He was right. Infuriatingly so. “Go straight on,” she reiterated to Oz, “just... let me out when you’re as close to my house as you’re going to get.”

“Buffy!” Giles wailed, panicked, “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me here! Please!” 

“I’m not. Shush, I’m not, it’s alright. It’s alright. It’s alright.”

The bra cup bow flopped absurdly on the side of his head as he thrashed restlessly on the floor of the van. Buffy stared at it, suddenly furious with herself. She couldn’t let him go into a public hospital, in what might be his last moments on Earth looking like that. “Oz,” she called “Do you have a first aid kit? Bandages... anything?”

“No,” he said, “but we’ll be there in five minutes...”

“Xander!” Buffy pleaded, starting to panic, “Do you have belt?”

“Yeah,” Xander answered, puzzled, “but it’s not bleeding anymore. I think maybe we should leave bad enough alone,” he tried to joke, worried that he was missing something important, but not sure what it could be. 

“I am not sending him into an ER full of people with my bra tied around his head!” Buffy insisted hotly. 

Xander was so stunned by her intensity that he had his belt off and was watching her rewrap the wound, telling her how to adjust the belt to keep the pressure on, before he even realized what she’d said. He didn’t have time to ask her about it if he’d wanted too. Moments later, Oz stopped at a red light about eight blocks from Buffy’s house and told her to get out. 

Giles held on to Buffy’s hand and begged her not to go. She forced his hand into Xander’s instead and bounded away into the night. Giles’ grip was tight and strong, which Xander guessed was a good sign though it wasn’t doing his hand any good. 

He tried whispering words of comfort, but it didn’t seem to work nearly as well for him as it had for Buffy. Giles was physically shaking now. Xander just hoped he wasn’t having some kind of a seizure. There was not one thing he could do about it. 

To distract himself, he picked up the bloodstained bra from the van floor in his free hand. Back at the car, he’d assumed it was Miss Calendar’s. He supposed it still could be. Buffy’s claiming it could have been a slip of the tongue, but it struck him as an odd slip to make. It seemed like a girl would probably recognize her own bra. It could have been a joke. Except, Buffy has been the opposite of joking when she’d said it. 

Casting an eye towards the front of the van to make sure Oz wasn’t looking, Xander held the undergarment beneath his nose and sniffed. It smelled like Buffy: her perfume, her shampoo, her sweat, all layered underneath the stronger scents of blood and smoke. There hadn’t been any smoke in the car crash, had there? He tried to remember what Miss Calendar had smelled like, but he hadn’t been in the habit of sniffing her. 

The van had, stopped. Xander hurriedly shoved the bra behind him then let it fall to the floor. Oz raised an opinionated eyebrow, but said only “Stay with him, I’ll get someone,” and ran through the Ambulance bay doors into the hospital.

*****

As Buffy cleared the Williamsons' fifteen-foot living-in-a-scary-watchful-town-that-makes-you-feel-a-dire-need-for-privacy fence, she caught a glimpse of Joyce's black SUV turning into the front drive. The low rumbling of the garage door drowned out the listless chirping of the last few California die-hard winter crickets. But she had already glided to the ground just shy of that ever faithful tree and was already scuttling up its trunk, already swinging the one branch over to the easy perch that gave upon her windowsill, as naturally as a balcony. 

Buffy's feet touched carpet before the garage door and the even quieter rumble of the car's engine ceased as one. She had not yet heard the tell-tale slam of the car door, let alone the turning of a key, when she careened into the bathroom in time to start the shower full blast so that Joyce would hear it already having been running. 

There. Now she had at least a halfway decent excuse not to have heard the phone calls, the are-you-there-yet-and-where-is-Mr.-Giles messages her mother surely must have left. 

Buffy leaned back against the locked bathroom door, at last finding a moment to breathe. It was not a moment to think, she had to remind herself. She had too much think, too tied up in great big knots, to shove into a moment. It would run over and ruin her alibi. She had to be in the shower before her mom starting calling, 'Buffy, is that you?', so that she could emerge all wet and clean in a less that infuriating amount of time. 

To that end, Buffy began to undress, starting with her denim jacket. On the verge of tossing it on the floor, she remembered the precious pills tucked inside the left pocket. As she reached inside, she considered and discarded the thought of taking them right-the-hell-now. Little more than half of the required wait time had elapsed. She was just about to try to think instead of where to hide them during her shower, when, suddenly, it didn't matter. 

“Buffy? Is that you?” Joyce called from below, tension edging the worry in her voice. That didn't matter either. For a moment, Buffy was not choosing not to think. For a moment, she stood, incapable of thought, staring at the object in her hand.

It was a tiny origami angel.


End file.
